;ERT BURNS 

BY .-GABRIEL 
SETOUN 




FAMOUS 
•SCOTS- 
'SERIES- 




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PUBLISHED B 
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CONTENTS 



CHAPTER I 

PAGE 

Birth and Education ..... 7 

CHAPTER II 

LOCHLEA AND MOSSGIEL ..... 2$ 

CHAPTER III 
The Series of Satires ..... 40 

CHAPTER IV 
The Kilmarnock Edition .... 56 

CHAPTER V 

The Edinburgh Edition .... 73 

CHAPTER VI 
BURNs's Tours ...... 92 

CHAPTER VII 

EllISLAND , . . . . .Ill 

CHAPTER VIII 
Dumfries ....... 128 

CHAPTER IX 
Summary and Estimate .... 148 



ROBERT BURNS 

CHAPTER I 

BIRTH AND EDUCATION 

Of the many biographies of Robert Burns that have 
been written, most of them laboriously and carefully, 
perhaps not one gives so luminous and vivid a portrait, 
so UfeUke and vigorous an impression of the personality 
of the poet and the man, as the picture the author has 
given of himself in his own writings. Burns's poems 
from first to last are, almost without exception, the 
literary embodiment of his feelings at a particular 
moment. He is for ever revealing himself to the 
reader, even in poems that might with propriety be 
said to be purely objective. His writings in a greater 
degree than the writings of any other author are the 
direct expression of his own experiences ; and in his 
poems and songs he is so invariably true to himself, so 
dominated by the mood of the moment, that every one 
of them gives us some glimpse into the heart and soul 
of the writer. In his letters he is rarely so happy ; fre- 
quently he is writing up to certain models, and ceases to 
be natural. Consequently we often miss in them the 
character and spirituality that is never absent from his 



8 FAMOUS SCOTS 

poetry. But his poems and songs, chronologically 
arranged, might make in themselves, and without the 
aid of any running commentary, a tolerably complete 
biography. Reading them, we note the development of 
his character and the growth of his pouers as a poet ; 
we can see at any particular time his attitude towards 
the world, and the world's attitude towards him ; we 
have, in fine, a picture of the man in his relations to his 
fellow-man and in relation to circumstances, and may 
learn if we will what mark he made on the society of 
his time, and what effect that society had on him. 
And that surely is an important essential of perfect 
biography. 

But otherwise the story of Burns's hfe has been told 
with such minuteness of detail, that the internal evidence 
of his poetry would seem only to be called in to verify 
or correct the verdict of tradition and the garbled gossip 
of those wise after the fact of his fame. It is so easy 
after a man has compelled the attention of the world 
to fill up the empty years of his life when he was all 
unknown to fame, with illustrative anecdotes and almost 
forgotten incidents, revealed and coloured by the light 
of after events ! This is a penalty of genius, and it is 
sometimes called fame, as if fame were a gift given of 
the world out of a boundless and unintelligent curiosity, 
and not the life-record ot work achieved. It is easier to 
collect ana and to make them into the patchwork pattern 
of a life than to read the character of the man in his 
writings; and patchwork, of necessity, has more of 
colour than the homespun web of a peasant-poet. 

Burns has suffered sorely at the hands of the anecdote- 
monger. One great feature of his poems is their perfect 



ROBERT BURNS 9 

sincerity. He pours out his soul in song ; tells the tale 
of his loves, his joys and sorrows, of his faults and 
failings, and the awful pangs of remorse. And if a man 
be candid and sincere, he will be taken at his word when 
he makes the world his confessional, and calls himself a 
sinner. There is pleasure to small minds in discovering 
that the gods are only clay ; that they who are guides 
and leaders are men of like passions with themselves, 
subject to the same temptations, and as liable to fall. 
This is the consolation of mediocrity in the presence of 
genius; and if from the housetops the poet proclaims 
his shortcomings, the world will hear him gladly and 
believe; his faults will be remembered, and his genius 
forgiven. What more easy than to bear out his testimony 
with the weight of collateral evidence, and the charitable 
anecdotage of acquaintances who knew him not ? Infor- 
mation that is vile and valueless may ever be had for the 
seeking; and it needs only to be whispered about for 
a season to find its way ultimately into print, and to 
flourish. 

It might naturally be expected at this time of day that 
all that is merely mythical and traditional might have 
been sifted from what is accredited and attested fact, 
that the chaff might have been winnowed from the grain 
in the life of Burns. In some of the most recently- 
published biographies this has been most carefully and 
conscientiously done; but through so many years wild 
and improbable stories had been allowed to thrive and 
to go unchallenged, that fiction has come to take the 
colour and character of fact, and to pass into history. 
' The general impression of the place,' that unfortunate 
phrase on which the late George GilfiUan based an 



lo FAMOUS SCOTS 

unpardonable attack on the character of the poet, has 
grown by slow degrees, and gained credence by the 
lapse of time, till it is accepted as the general impression 
of the country. Those who would speak of the poet 
Robert Burns are expected to speak apologetically, and 
to point a moral from the story of a wasted life. For 
that has become a convention, and convention is always 
respectable. But after all is said and done, the devil's 
advocate makes a wretched biographer. It seems 
strange and unaccountable that men should dare to 
become apologists for one who has sung himself into 
the heart and conscience of his country, and taken the 
ear of the world. Yet there have been apologists even 
for the poetry of Burns. We are told, wofully, that 
he wrote only short poems and songs ; was content with 
occasional pieces ; did not achieve any long and sus- 
tained effort — to be preserved, it is to be expected, in a 
folio edition, and assigned a fitting place among other 
musty and hide -bound immortals on the shelves of 
libraries under lock and key. As well might we seek 
to apologise for the fields and meadows, in so far as 
they bring forth neither corn nor potatoes, but only 
grasses and flowers, to dance to the piping of the wind, 
and nod in the sunshine of summer. 

It is a healthier sign, however, that the more recent 
biographers of Burns snap their fingers in the face of 
convention, and, looking to the legacy he has left the 
world, refuse to sit in sackcloth and ashes round his 
grave, either in the character of moralising mourners 
or charitable mutes. Whatever has to be said against 
them nowadays, the 'cant of concealment' — to adopt 
another of Gilfillan's phrases — is not to be laid to their 



ROBERT BURNS ii 

charge. Rather have they rushed to the other extreme, 
and in their eagerness to do justice to the memory of 
the poet, led the reader astray in a wilderness of 
unnecessary detail. So much is now known of Burns, 
so many minute and unimportant details of his life and 
the Hves of others have been unearthed, that the poet is, 
so to speak, buried in biography ; the character and the 
personality of the man lost in the voluminous testimony 
of many witnesses. Reading, we note the care and 
conscientiousness of the writer ; we have but a confused 
and blurred impression of the poet. Although a century 
has passed since his death, we do not yet see the events 
of Burns's life in proper perspective. Things trifling in 
themselves, and of little bearing on his character, have 
been preserved, and are still recorded with painful 
elaboration; while the sidelights from friends, com- 
panions, and acquaintances, male and female, are many 
and bewildering. 

Would it not be possible out ol this mass of material 
to tell the story of Robert Burns's life simply and clearly, 
neither wandering away into the family histories and 
genealogies of a crowd of uninteresting contemporaries, 
nor wasting time in elaborating inconsequential trifles ? 
What is wanted is a picture of the man as he was, and 
an understanding of all that tended to make him the 
name and the power he is in the world to-day. 

William Burness, the father of the poet, was a native 
of Kincardineshire, and ' was thrown by early misfortunes 
on the world at large.' After many years' wanderings, 
he at last settled in Ayrshire, where he worked at first 
as a gardener before taking a lease of some seven acres 
of land near the Bridge of Doon, and beginning business 



12 FAMOUS SCOTS 

as a nurseryman. It was to a clay cottage which he 
built on this land that he brought his wife, Agnes Broun, 
in December 1757 ; and here the poet was born in 1759. 
The date of his birth is not likely to be forgotten. 

' Our monarch's hindmost year but ane 
Was five-and-twenty days begun, 
*Twas then a blast o' Jan'war' win' 
Blew hansel in on Robin.' 

To his father Burns owed much ; and if there be any- 
thing in heredity in the matter of genius, it was from 
him that he inherited his marvellous mental powers. 
His mother is spoken of as a shrewd and sagacious 
woman, with education enough to enable her to read her 
Bible, but unable to write her own name. She had a 
great love for old ballads, and Robert as a boy must 
often have listened to her chanting the quaint old songs 
with which her retentive memory was stored. The poet 
resembled his mother in feature, although he had the 
swarthy complexion of his father. Attempts have been 
made now and again to trace his ancestry on the 
father's side, and to give to the world a kind of 
genealogy of genius. Writers have demonstrated to 
their own satisfaction that it was perfectly natural that 
Burns should have been the man he was. But the 
other children of William Burness were not great poets. 
It has even been discovered that his genius was Celtic, 
whatever that may mean ! Excursions and speculations 
of this kind are vain and unprofitable, hardly more 
reputable than the profanities of the Dumfries crani- 
ologists who, in 1834, in the early hours of April ist, — 
a day well chosen, — desecrated the poet's dust. They 
fingered his skull, 'applied their compasses to it, and 



ROBERT BURNS 13 

satisfied themselves that Burns had capacity enough to 
write Ta7n d Shunter, The Cotter's Saturday Night, and 
To Mary in Heaven.^ Let us take the poet as he comes 
to us, a gift of the gods, and be thankful. As La 
Bruybre puts it, 'Ces hommes n'ont ni ancetres ni 
postdritds; ils ferment eux seuls toute une de- 
scendance.' 

What Burns owed particularly to his father he has 
told us himself both in prose and verse. The exquisite 
and beautiful picture of the father and his family at 
their evening devotions is taken from life ; and William 
Burness is the sire who 

' turns o'er with patriarchal grace 
The big ha'-bib]e ance his father's pride ' ; 

and in his fragment of autobiography the poet remarks : 
'My father picked up a pretty large quantity of ob- 
servation and experience, to which I am indebted for 
most of my pretensions to wisdom. I have met with 
few men who understood men, their manners and their 
ways, equal to him ; but stubborn, ungainly integrity and 
headlong, ungovernable irascibility are disqualifying cir- 
cumstances ; consequently I was born a very poor man's 
son, ... It was his dearest wish and prayer to have it 
in his power to keep his children under his own eye till 
they could discern between good and evil ; so with the 
assistance of his generous master, he ventured on a small 
farm in that gentleman's estate.' 

This estimate of William Burness is endorsed and 
amphfied by Mr. Murdoch, who had been engaged by 
him to teach his children, and knew him intimately. 

* I myself,' he says, ' have always considered William 



J 



14 FAMOUS SCOTS 

Burness as by far the best of the human race that ever 
I had the pleasure of being acquainted with. He was 
an excellent husband ; a tender and affectionate father. 
He had the art of gaining the esteem and goodwill of 
those that were labourers under him. He carefully 
practised every known duty, and avoided everything 
that was criminal ; or, in the apostle's words, Herein did 
he exercise himself in living a life void of offence towards 
God and man.^ 

Even in his manner of speech he was different from 
men in his own walk in life. ' He spoke the English 
language with more propriety (both with respect to 
diction and pronunciation) than any man I ever knew 
with no greater advantages.' 

Truly was Burns blessed in his parents, especially in 
his father. Naturally such a father wished his children 
to have the best education his means could afford. It 
may be that he saw even in the infancy of his firstborn 
the promise of intellectual greatness. Certain it is he 
laboured, as few fathers even in Scotland have done, to 
have his children grow up intelligent, thoughtful, and 
virtuous men and women. 

Robert Burns's first school was at Alloway Mill, about 
a mile from home, whither he was sent when in his 
sixth year. He had not been long there, however, when 
the father combined with a few of his neighbours to 
establish a teacher in their own neighbourhood. That 
teacher was Mr. Murdoch, a young man at that time in 
his nineteenth year. 

This is an important period in the poet's life, although 
he himself in his autobiography only briefly touches on 
his schooling under Murdoch. He has more to say of 



ROBERT BURNS I'S 

what he owed to an old maid of his mother's, remark- 
able for her ignorance, credulity, and superstition. 
'She had, I suppose, the largest collection in the 
country of tales and songs concerning devils, ghosts, 
fairies, brownies, witches, warlocks, spunkies, kelpies, 
elf-candles, dead-lights, wraiths, apparitions, cantraips, 
enchanted towers, giants, dragons, and other trumpery. 
This cultivated the latent seeds of Poesy ; but had so 
strong an effect on my imagination, that to this hour, 
in my nocturnal rambles, I sometimes keep a sharp look- 
out in suspicious places; and though nobody can be 
more sceptical in these matters than I, yet it often 
takes an effort of philosophy to shake off these idle 
terrors.' 

It ought not to be forgotten that Burns had a better 
education than most lads of his time. Even in the 
present day many in better positions have not the 
advantages that Robert and Gilbert Burns had, the 
sons of such a father as William Burness, and under 
such an earnest and thoughtful teacher as Mr. Murdoch. 
It is important to notice this, because Burns is too often 
regarded merely as a lusus nature ; a being gifted with 
song, and endowed by nature with understanding from 
his birth. We hear too much of the ploughman poet. 
His genius and natural abilities are unquestioned and 
unquestionable; but there is more than mere natural 
genius in his writings. They are the work of a man 
of no mean education, and bear the stamp — however 
spontaneously his songs sing themselves in our ears — of 
culture and study. In a letter to Dr. Moore several 
years later than now. Burns himself declared against 
the popular view. * I have not a doubt but the knack, 



i6 FAMOUS SCOTS 

the aptitude to learn the Muses' trade is a gift 
bestowed by Him who forms the secret bias of the 
soul j but I as firmly believe that excellence in the 
profession is the fruit of industry, attention, labour, 
and pains. At least I am resolved to try my doctrine 
by the test of experience.' There is a class of people, 
however, to whom this will sound heretical, forbidding 
them, as it were, the right to babble with grovelling 
familiarity of Rab, Rob, Robbie, Scotia's Bard, and 
the Ploughman Poet ; and insisting on his name being 
spoken with conscious pride of utterance, Robert Burns, 
Poet. 

Gilbert Burns, writing to Dr. Currie of the school-days 
under Mr. Murdoch, says : ' We learnt to read English 
tolerably well, and to write a little. He taught us, too, 
the English Grammar. I was too young to profit much 
by his lessons in grammar, but Robert made some pro- 
ficiency in it — a circumstance of considerable weight in 
the unfolding of his genius and character, as he soon 
became remarkable for the fluency and correctness of 
his expression, and read the few books that came in 
his way with much pleasure and improvement ; for even 
then he was a reader when he could get a book.' 

After the family removed to Mount Oliphant, the 
brothers attended Mr. Murdoch's school for two years 
longer, until Mr. Murdoch was appointed to a better 
situation, and the little school was broken up. There- 
after the father looked after the education of his boys 
himself, not only helping them with their reading at 
home after the labours of the day, but 'conversing 
familiarly with them on all subjects, as if they had been 
men, and being at great pains, as they accompanied 



ROBERT BURNS 17 

him on the labours of the farm, to lead conversation to 
such subjects as might tend to increase their knowledge 
or confirm them in virtuous habits.' Among the books 
he borrowed or bought for them at that period were 
Salmon's Geographical Gramfnar, Derham's Physico- 
Theology\ Ray's Wisdom of God in the Works of 
Creation, and Stackhouse's History of the Bible. It 
was about this time, too, that Robert became possessed 
of The Complete Letter- Writer, a book which Gilbert 
declared was to Robert of the greatest consequence, 
since it inspired him with a great desire to excel in 
letter- writing, and furnished him with models by some 
of the first writers in our language. Perhaps this book 
was a great gain It is questionable. What would 
Robert Burns's letters have been had he never seen a 
Complete Letter- Writer, and never read 'those models 
by some of the first writers in our language'? Easier 
and more natural, we are of opinion ; and he might 
have written fewer. Those in the Complete Letter- 
Writer style we could easily have spared. His teacher, 
Mr. Murdoch, furnishes some excellent examples of the 
stilted epistolary style that was then fashionable. 

'But now the plains of Mount OHphant began to 
whiten, and Robert was summoned to relinquish the 
pleasing scenes that surrounded the grotto of Calypso, 
and, armed with a sickle, to seek glory by signalising 
himself in the fields of Ceres.' Though Robert Burns 
never perpetrated anything like this, his models were 
not without their pernicious effect on his prose com- 
positions. 

When Robert was about fourteen years old, he and 
Gilbert were sent for a time, week about, to a school 
2 



i8 FAMOUS SCOTS 

at Dalrymple, and the year following Robert was sent 
to Ayr to revise his English grammar under Mr. Mur- 
doch. While there he began the study of French, 
bringing with him, when he returned home, a French 
Dictionary and Grammar and Fenelon's Telemaque. 
In a little while he could read and understand any 
French author in prose. He also gave some time to 
Latin ; but finding it dry and uninteresting work, he 
soon gave it up. Still he must have picked up a little 
of that language, and we know that he returned to the 
rudiments frequently, although 'the Latin seldom pre- 
dominated, a day or two at a time, or a week at most.' 
Under the heading of general reading might be men- 
tioned The Life of Hannibal, The Life of Wallace, The 
Spectator, Pope's Homer, Locke's Essay on the Human 
Understanditig, Allan Ramsay's Works, and several 
Plays of Shakspeare. All this is worth noting, even at 
some length, because it shows how Burns was being 
educated, and what books went to form and improve 
his literary taste. 

Yet when we consider the circumstances of the 
family we see that there was not much time for study. 
The work on the farm allowed Burns little leisure, but 
every spare moment would seem to have been given 
to reading. Father and sons, we are told by one who 
afterwards knew the family at Lochlea, used to sit at 
their meals with books in their hands ; and the poet 
says that one book in particular, A Select Collection of 
English Songs, was his vade mecum. He pored over 
them, driving his cart or walking to labour, song by 
song, verse by verse, carefully noting the true, tender, or 
subUme from affectation or fustian. ' I am convinced,' 



ROBERT BURNS 19 

he adds, ' I owe to this practice much of my critic craft, 
such as it is.' 

The years of their stay at Mount Oliphant were years of 
unending toil and of poverty bravely borne. The whole 
period was a long fight against adverse circumstances. 
Looking back on his life at this time. Burns speaks of 
it as 'the cheerless gloom of a hermit with the un- 
ceasing moil of a galley slave ' ; and we can well believe 
that this is no exaggerated statement. His brother 
Gilbert is even more emphatic. ' Mount Oliphant,' 
he says, 'is almost the poorest soil I know of in a 
state of cultivation. . . . My father, in consequence 
of this, soon came into difficulties, which were increased 
by the loss of several of his cattle by accident and 
disease. To the buffetings of misfortune we could only 
oppose hard labour and the most rigid economy. We 
lived very sparingly. For several years butcher's meat 
was a stranger in the house, while all the members of 
the fam.ily exerted themselves to the utmost of their 
strength, and rather beyond it, in the labours of the 
farm. My brother, at the age of thirteen, assisted in 
thrashing the crop of corn, and at fifteen was the 
principal labourer on the farm ; for we had no hired 
servant, male or female. The anguish of mind we felt 
at our tender years under these straits and difficulties 
was very great. To think of our father growing old 
(for he was now above fifty), broken down with the 
long-continued fatigues of his life, with a wife and five 
other children, and in a declining state of circumstances, 
these reflections produced in my brother's mind and 
mine sensations of the deepest distress. I doubt not 
but the hard labour and sorrow of this period of his 



20 FAMOUS SCOTS 

life was in a great measure the cause of that depression of 
spirits with which Robert was so often afflicted through 
his whole life afterwards. At this time he was almost 
constantly afflicted in the evenings with a dull head- 
ache, which at a future period of his life was exchanged 
for a palpitation of the heart and a threatening of 
fainting and suffocation in his bed in the night-time.' 

This, we doubt not, is a true picture — melancholy, 
yet beautiful. But not only did this increasing toil and 
worry to make both ends meet, injure the bodily health 
of the poet, but it did harm to him in other ways. It 
affected, to a certain extent, his moral nature. Those 
bursts of bitterness which we find now and again in 
his poems, and more frequently in his letters, are 
assuredly the natural outcome of these unsocial and 
laborious years. Burns was a man of sturdy independ- 
ence; too often this independence became aggressive. 
He was a man of marvellous keenness of perception; 
too frequently did this manifest itself in a sulky suspicion, 
a harshness of judgment, and a bitterness of speech. 
We say this in no spirit of fault-finding, but merely 
point it out as a natural consequence of a wretched 
and leisureless existence. This was the education of 
circumstances — hard enough in Burns's case; and if it 
developed in him certain sterling qualities, gave him 
an insight into and a sympathy with the lives of his 
struggling fellows, it at the same time warped, to a 
certain extent, his moral nature. 

What was his outlook on the world at this time ? He 
measured himself with those he met, we may be sure, 
for Burns certainly (as he says of his father) ' under- 
stood men, their manners and their ways,' as it is given 



ROBERT BURNS 21 

to very few to be able to do. Of the ploughmen, farmers, 
lairds, or factors, he saw round about him there was none 
to compare with him in natural ability, few his equal in 
field-work. *At the plough, scythe, or reap-hook,' he 
remarks, ' I feared no competitor.' Yet, conscious of 
easy superiority, he saw himself a drudge, almost a slave, 
while those whom nature had not blessed with brains 
were gifted with a goodly share of this world's wealth. 

It's hardly in a body's power 

To keep at times frae being sour, 

To see how things are shar'd ; 

How best o' chiels are whiles in want, 

While coofs on countless thousands rant, 

An' ken na how to wair 't.' 

His father, his brother, and himself — all the members 
of the family indeed — toiled unceasingly, yet were unable 
to better their position. Matters, indeed, got worse, and 
worst of all when their landlord died, and they were left 
to the tender mercies of a factor. The name of this man 
we do not know, nor need we seek to know it. We know 
the man himself, and he will live for ever a type of 
tyrannous, insolent insignificance. 

' I've noticed, on our Laird's court-day, 
An' mony a time my heart's been wae, 
Poor tenant bodies, scant o' cash, 
How they maun thole a factor's snash : 
He'll stamp an' thieaten, curse an swear, 
He'll apprehend them, poind their gear: 
While they maun stan', wi' aspect humble, 
An' hear it a', an' fear an' tremble.' 

Is it to be wondered at that Burns's blood boiled at 
times, or that he should now and again look at those in 
easier circumstances with snarling suspicion, and give 



22 FAMOUS SCOTS 

vent to his feelings in words of rankling bitterness? 
Robert Burns and h.s father were just such men as an 
insolent factor would take a fiendish delight in torturing. 
' My indignation yet boils, Burns wrote years afterwards, 
' at the recollection of the scoundrel factor's insolent, 
threatening letters, which used to set us all in tears.' 
Had they 'boo'd and becked' at his biddmg, and 
grovelled at his feet, he might have had some glimmering 
sense of justice, and thought it mercy. But the Burnses 
were men of a different stamp, 'William Burness always 
treated superiors with a becoming respect, but he never 
gave the smallest encouragement to aristocratical arro- 
gance ' ; and his son Robert was not less manly and 
independent. He was too sound in judgment ; too 
conscious of his own worth, to sink into mean and abject 
servility. But this factor, perhaps more than anyone 
else, did much to pervert, if he could not kill, the poet's 
spirit of independence. 

Curiously enough, the opening sentences of his auto- 
biographical sketch have a suspicious ring of the pride 
that apes humility. There is something harsh and 
aggressive in his unnecessary confidence. * I have not 
the most distant pretensions to assume the character 
which the pye-coated guardians of escutcheons call a 
gentleman. When at Edinburgh last winter I got ac- 
quainted at the Herald's office; and, looking through 
that granary of honours, I there found almost every name 
in the kingdom ; but for me, 

" My ancient but ignoble blood 
Had crept through scoundrels ever since the flood." 

Gules, Purpure, Argent, etc., quite disowned me.' All 
this is quite gratuitous and hardly in good taste. 



ROBERT BURNS 23 

Yet, in spite of untoward circumstances, ceaseless 
drudgery, and insufficient diet, the family of Mount 
Oliphant was not utterly lost to happiness. With such a ^ 
shrewd mother and such a father as William Burness— 
a man of whom Scotland may be justly proud— no home 
could be altogether unhappy. In Burns's picture of the 
family circle in The Cotter's Saturday Night there is 
nothing of bitterness or gloom or melancholy. 

'With joy unfeign'd brothers and sisters meet, 

An' each for other's welfare kindly spiers : 
The social hours, swift-wing'd, unnotic'd fleet ; 

Each tells the uncos that he sees or hears. 
The parents, partial, eye their hopeful years; ^ 

Anticipation forward points the view : 
The mother, wi' her needle an' her shears, 

Gars auld claes look amaist as weel's the new ; 
The father mixes a' wi' admonition due.' 

In the work of the farm, too, hard as it was, there was 
pleasure, and the poet's first song, with the picture he 
gives of the partners in the harvest field, breaks forth 
from this life of cheerless gloom and unceasing moil like 
a blink of sunshine through a lowering sky. Burns's 
description of how the song came to be made is worthy 
of quotation, because it gives us a very clear and well- 
defined likeness of himself at the time, a lad in years, 
but already counting himself among men. ' You know 
our country custom of coupling a man and a woman 
together in the labours of harvest. In my fifteenth 
autumn my partner was a bewitching creature who just 
counted an autumn less. In short, she, unwittingly to 
herself, initiated me into a certairi delicious passion, 
which ... I hold to be the first of human joys. ... I did not 
well know myself why I liked so much to loiter behind 



24 FAMOUS SCOTS 

her when returning in the evening from our labours ; 
why the tones of her voice made my heart-strings thrill 
like an ^olian harp , and particularly why my pulse 
beat such a furious rantann when I looked and fingered 
over her hand to pick out the nettle-stings and thistles. 
Among her other love-inspiring qualifications she sang 
sweetly ; and 'twas her favourite Scotch reel that I at- 
tempted to give an embodied vehicle to in rhyme. I 
was not so presumptive as to imagine I could make verses 
like printed ones composed by men who had Greek and 
Latin ; but my girl sung a song which was said to be 
composed by a small country laird's son, on one of his 
father's maids with whom he was in love ; and I saw no 
reason why I might not rhyme as well as he.' 

He had already measured himself with this moorland 
poet, and admits no inferiority ; and what a laird's son 
has done he too may do. Writing of this song afterwards. 
Burns, who was always a keen critic, admits that it is 
•very puerile and silly.' Still, we think there is something 
of beauty, and much of promise, in this early effusion. 
It has at least one of the merits, and, in a sense, the 
pecuHar characteristic of all Burns's songs. It is sincere 
and natural ; and that is the beginning of all good writing. 

• Thus with me,' he says, ' began love and poetry, 
which at times have been my only and . . . my highest 
enjoyment.' This was the first-fruit of his poetic genius, 
and we doubt not that in the composition, and after the 
composition, life at Mount Oliphant was neither so 
cheerless nor so hard as it had been. A new life was 
opened up to him with a thousand nameless hopes and 
aspirations, though probably as yet he kept all these 
things to himself, and pondered them in his heart. 



CHAPTER II 



LOCHLEA AND MOSSGIEL 



The farm at Mount OHphant proved a ruinous failure, 
and after weathering their last two years on it under the 
tyranny of the scoundrel factor, it was with feelings of 
relief, we may be sure, that the family removed to Loch- 
lea, in the parish of Tarbolton. This was a farm of 130 
acres of land rising from the right bank of the river Ayr. 
The farm appeared to them more promising than the 
one they had left. The prospect from its uplands was 
extensive and beautiful. It commanded a view of the 
Carrick Hills, and the Firth of Clyde beyond ; but where 
there are extensive views to be had the land is neces- 
sarily exposed. The farm itself was bleak and bare, and 
twenty shillings an acre was a high rent for fields so 
situated. 

The younger members of the family, however, were 
now old enough to be of some assistance in the house 
or in the fields, and for a few years life was brighter than 
it had been before ; not that labour was lighter to them 
here, but simply because they had escaped the meshes 
and machinations of a petty tyrant, ^nd worked more 
cheerfully, looking to the future with confidence. Father, 
mother, and children all worked as hard as they were 

able, and none more ungrudgingly than the poet. 

25 



26 FAMOUS SCOTS 

We know little about those first few years of life at 
Lochlea, which should be matter for special thanks- 
giving. Better we should know nothing at all than that 
we should learn of misfortunes coming upon them, and 
see the family again in tears and forced to thole a factor's 
snash ; better silence than the later unsavoury episodes, 
which have not yet been allowed decent burial. Prob- 
ably life went evenly and beautifully in those days. 
The brothers accompanied their father to the fields ; 
Agnes milked the cows, reciting the while to her younger 
sisters, Annabella and Isabella, snatches of song or 
psalm ; and in the evening the whole family would again 
gather round the ingle to raise their voices in Dundee or 
Martyrs or Elgin, and then to hear the priest-like father 
read the sacred page. 

The little that we do know is worth recording. 
' Gilbert,' to quote from Chambers's excellent edition of 
the poet's works, ' used to speak of his brother as being 
at this period a more admirable being than at any other. 
He recalled with delight the days when they had to go 
with one or two companions to cut peats for the winter 
fuel, because Robert was sure to enliven their toil with 
a rattling fire of witty remarks of men and things, 
mingled with the expressions of a genial glowing heart, 
and the whole perfectly free from the taint which he 
afterwards acquired from his contact with the world. 
Not even in those volumes which afterwards charmed his 
country from end to end, did Gilbert see his brother in so 
interesting a light as in those conversations in the bog, 
with only two or three noteless peasants for an audience.' 

This is a beautiful picture: the poet enlivening toil 
with talk, lighting and illustrating all he said with his 



ROBERT BURNS 27 

lively imagination; Gilbert listening silently, and a group 
of noteless peasants dumb with wonder. No artist has 
yet painted this picture of Burns, as his brother saw him, 
at his best. Writers have glanced at the scene and 
passed it by. It needed to be looked at with naked, 
appreciative eyes ; they had come with microscopes to 
the study of Burns. Far more interesting material 
awaited them farther on • The Poefs Welcome^ for ex- 
ample ! They could amplify that. Here, too, is the 
first hint of Burns's brilliant powers as a talker; a 
glimpse on this lonely peat moss of the man who, not 
many years afterwards, was to dazzle literary Edinburgh 
with the sparkle and force of his graphic speech. 

Probably it was about this time that Burns went for 
a summer to a school at Kirkoswald. In his autobio- 
graphy he says it was his seventeenth year, and, if so, 
it must have been before the family had left Mount 
Oliphant. Gilbert's recollection was that the poet 
was then in his nineteenth year, which would bring 
the incident into the Lochlea period. In the new 
edition of Chambers's Burns, William Wallace accepts 
Robert's statement as correct ; yet we hardly think the 
poet would have spent a summer at school at a time 
when the family was under the heel of that merciless 
factor. Besides, although he speaks of his seventeenth 
year, he has just made mention of the fact that he was 
in the secret of half the amours of the parish ; and it 
was in the parish of Tarbolton that we hear of him 
acting ' as the second of night-hunting swains.' Prob- 
ably also it would be after the family had found com- 
parative peace and quiet in their new home that it would 
occur to Burns to resume his studies in a methodical 



28 FAMOUS SCOTS 

way. The point is a small one. The important thing 
is, that in his seventeenth or nineteenth summer he went 
to a noted school on a smuggling coast to learn mathe- 
matics, surveying, dialling, etc., in which he made a 
pretty good progress. * But,' he says, ' I made a greater 
progress in the knowledge of mankind. The contraband 
trade was at this time very successful ; scenes of swag- 
gering riot and roaring dissipation were as yet new to 
me, and I was no enemy to social life. Here, though I 
learnt to look unconcernedly on a large tavern bill and 
mix without fear in a drunken squabble, yet I went on 
with a high hand in my geometry.' 

The glimpses we have of Burns during his stay here 
are all characteristic of the man. We see a young man 
looking out on a world that is new to him ; moving in a 
society to which he had hitherto been a stranger. His 
eyes are opened not only to the knowledge of mankind, 
but to a better knowledge of himself. Thirsting for infor- 
mation and power, we find him walking with Willie Niven, 
his companion from Maybole, away from the village to 
where they might have peace and quiet, and converse 
on subjects calculated to improve their minds. They 
sharpen their wits in debate, taking sides on speculative 
questions, and arguing the matter to their own satisfaction. 
No doubt in these conversations and debates he was 
developing that gift of clear reasoning and lucid expres- 
sion which afterwards so confounded the literary and 
legal luminaries of Edinburgh. They had made a study 
of logic, but here was a man from the plough who held 
his own with them, discussing questions which in their 
opinion demanded a special training. For an uncouth 
country ploughman gifted with song they were prepared. 



ROBERT BURNS 29 

but they did not expect one who could meet them in 
conversation with the fence and foil of a skilled logician. 
We may see also his burning desire for distinction in that 
scene in school when he led the self-confident school- 
master into debate and left him humiliated in the eyes 
of the pupils. Even in his contests with John Niven 
there was the same eagerness to excel. When he could 
not beat him in WTestling or putting the stone, he was 
fain to content himself with a display of his superiority in 
mental calisthenics. The very fact that a charming 
fillette overset his trigonometry, and set him off at a 
tangent, is a characteristic ending to this summer of 
study. Peggy Thomson in her kail-yard was too much 
for the fiery imagination of a poet : ' it was in vain to 
think of doing more good at school.' 

Too much stress is not to be laid on Burns's own 
mention of 'scenes of swaggering riot and dissipation' 
at Kirkoswald. Such things were new to him, and 
made a lasting impression on his mind. We know that 
he returned home very considerably improved. His 
reading was enlarged with the very important addition 
of Thomson's and Shenstone's works. He had seen 
human nature in a new phasis, and now he engaged in 
literary correspondence with several of his schoolfellows. 

It was not long after his return from Kirkoswald that 
the Bachelor's Club was founded, and here could Burns 
again exercise his debating powers and find play for his 
expanding intellect. The members met to forget their 
cares in mirth and diversion, ' without transgressing the 
bounds of innocent decorum ' ; and the chief diversion 
appears to have been debate. 

If we are to believe Gilbert, the seven years of their 



30 FAMOUS SCOTS 

stay in Tarbolton parish were not marked by much 
literary improvement in Robert. That may well have 
been Gilbert's opinion at the time; for the poet was 
working hard on the farm, and often spending an evening 
at Tarbolton or at one or other of the neighbouring farms. 
But he managed all the same to get through a consider- 
able amount of reading ; and though, perhaps, he did 
not devote himself so sedulously to books as he had been 
accustomed to do in the seclusion of Mount Oliphant, he 
was storing his mind in other ways. His keen observa- 
tion was at work, and he was studying what was of more 
interest and importance to him than books — ' men, their 
manners and their ways.' * I seem to be one sent into 
the world,' he remarks in a letter to Mr. Murdoch, * to 
see and observe ; and I very easily compound with the 
knave who tricks me of my money, if there be anything 
original about him, which shows me human nature in a 
different light from anything I have seen before.' Partly it 
was this passion to see and observe, partly it was another 
passion that made him the assisting confidant of most of 
the country lads in their amours. 'I had a curiosity, zeal, 
and intrepid dexterity in these matters which recom- 
mended me as a proper second in duels of that kind.' 
His song, My Nannie, O, which belongs to this period, is 
not only true as a lyric of sweet and simple love, but is also 
true to the particular style of love-making then in vogue. 

'The westlin wind blaws loud an' shill; 
The night's baith mirk and rainy, O : 
But I'll get my plaid, an' out I'll steal, 
An' owre the hills to Nannie, O.' 

According to Gilbert, the poet himself was constantly 
the victim of some fair enslaver, although, being jealous 



ROBERT BURNS 31 

of those richer than himself, he was not aspiring in his 
loves. But while there was hardly a comely maiden in 
Tarbolton to whom he did not address a song, we are not 
to imagine that he was frittering his heart away amongst 
them all. A poet may sing lyrics of love to many while 
his heart is true to one. The one at this time to Robert 
Burns was Ellison Begbie, to whom some of his songs 
are addressed — notably Mary Morrison, one of the 
purest and most beautiful love lyrics ever poet penned. 
Nothing is more striking than the immense distance 
between this composition and any he had previously 
written. In this song he for the first time stepped to 
the front rank as a song-writer, and gave proof to himself, 
if to nobody else at the time, of the genius that was in 
him. A few letters to Ellison Begbie are also preserved, 
pure and honourable in sentiment, but somewhat artificial 
and formal in expression. It was because of his love 
for her, and his desire to be settled in life, that he took to 
the unfortunate flax-dressing business in Irvine. That 
is something of an unlovely and mysterious episode in 
Burns's life. Suffice it to say in his own words : ' This 
turned out a sadly unlucky affair. My partner was a 
scoundrel of the first water, and, to finish the whole 
business, while we were giving a welcome carousal to the 
New Year, our shop, by the drunken carelessness of my 
partner's wife, took fire and burned to ashes, and I was 
left, like a true poet, not worth a sixpence." 

His stay at Irvine was neither pleasant for him at the 
time nor happy in its results. He met there 'acquaint- 
ances of a freer manner of thinking and living than he 
had been used to ' ; and it needs something more than 
the family misfortunes and the deathbed of his father to 



32 FAMOUS SCOTS 

account for that terrible fit of hypochondria when he 
returned to Lochlea. 'For three months I was in a 
diseased state of body and mind, scarcely to be envied 
by the hopeless wretches who have just got their sentence, 
Depart from me^ ye cursed.^ 

Up to this time, the twenty-fifth year of his age, Burns 
had not written much. Besides Mary Morrison might 
be mentioned The Death and Dying Words of Poor 
Mailie, and another bewitching song. The Rigs d Barley^ 
which is surely an expression of the innocent abandon, 
the delicious rapture of pure and trustful love. But 
what he had written was work of promise, while at least 
one or two of his songs had the artistic finish as well as 
the spontaneity of genuine poetry. In all that he had 
done, * puerile and silly,' to quote his own criticism of 
Handsome Nell, or at times halting and crude, there was 
the ring of sincerity. He was not merely an echo, as too 
many polished poetasters in their first attempts have been. 
Such jinglers are usually as happy in their juvenile 
effusions as in their later efforts. But Burns from the 
first tried to express what was in him, what he himself 
felt, and in so far had set his feet on the road to perfec- 
tion. Being natural, he was bound to improve by practice, 
and if there was genius in him to become in time a great 
poet. That he was already conscious of his powers we 
know, and the longing for fame, 'that last infirmity of noble 
mind,' was strong in him and continually growing stronger. 

'Then out into the world my course I did determine, 
Though to be rich was not my wish, yet to be great was 

charming ; 
My talents they were not the worst, nor yet my education ; 
Resolved was I at least to try to mend my situation.' 



ROBERT BURNS 33 

Before this he had thought of more ambitious things 
than songs, and had sketched the outlines of a tragedy ; 
but it was only after meeting with Fergusson's Scotch 
Foems that he 'struck his wildly resounding lyre with 
rustic vigour.' In his commonplace book, begun in 1783, 
we have ever-recurring hints of his devoting himself to 
poetry, ' For my own part I never had the least 
thought or inclination of turning poet till I got once 
heartily in love, and then Rhyme and Song were in a 
measure the spontaneous language of my heart.' 

The story of Wallace from tlie poem by Blind Harry 
had years before fired his imagination, and his heart 
had glowed with a wish to make a song on that hero in 
some measure equal to his merits, 

' E'en then, a wish, I mind its power — 
A wish that to my latest hour 

Shall strongly heave my breast — 
That I, for poor aukl Scotland's sake, 
Some usefu' plan or beuk could make, 

Or sing a sang at least.' 

This was written afterwards, but it is retrospective of 
the years of his dawning ambition. 

For a time, however, all dreams of greatness are to 
be set aside as vain. The family had again fallen on 
evil days, and when the father died, his all went * among 
the hell-hounds that grovel in the kennel of justice.' 
This was no time for poetry, and Robert was too much 
of a man to think merely of his own aims and ambitions 
in such a crisis. It was only by ranking as creditors to 
their father's estate for arrears of wages that the children 
of William Burness made a shift to scrape together a 
little money, with which Robert and Gilbert were able to 
3 



34 FAMOUS SCOTS 

stock the neighbouring farm of Mossgiel, Thither the 
family removed in March 1784; and it is on this farm 
that the life of the poet becomes most deeply interesting. 
The remains of the father were buried in Alloway Kirk- 
yard ; and on a small tombstone over the grave the poet 
bears record to the blameless life of the loving husband, 
the tender father, and the friend of man. He had 
lived long enough to hear some of his son's poems, and 
to express admiration for their beauty ; but he had also 
noted the passionate nature of his first-born. There 
was one of his family, he said on his deathbed, for 
whose future he feared ; and Robert knew who that one 
was. He turned to the window, the tears streaming 
down his cheeks. 

Mossgiel, to which the brothers now removed, taking 
with them their widowed mother, was a farm of about 
one hundred and eighteen acres of cold clayey soil, 
close to the village of Mauchline. The farm-house, 
having been originally the country house of their land- 
lord, Mr. Gavin Hamilton, was more commodious and 
comfortable than the home they had left. Here the 
brothers settled down, determined to do all in their 
power to succeed. They made a fresh start in Ufe, 
and if hard work and rigid economy could have com- 
pelled success, they might now have looked to the 
future with an assurance of comparative prosperity. 
Mr. Gavin Hamilton was a kind and generous land- 
lord, and the rent was only £,go a year ; considerably 
lower than they had paid at Lochlea. 

But misfortune seemed to pursue this family, and ruin 
to wait on their every undertaking. Burns says : * I 
entered on this farm with a full resolution, "Come, go 



ROBERT BURNS 35 

to, I will be wise." I read farming books ; I calculated 
crops; I attended markets; and, in short, in spite of 
the devil, the world, and the flesh, I should have been 
a wise man ; but the first year, from unfortunately 
buying in bad seed ; the second from a late harvest, we 
lost half of both our crops. This overset all my wisdom, 
and I returned like the dog to his vomit, and the sow 
that was washed to her wallowing in the mire.' 

That this resolution was not just taken in a repentant 
mood merely to be forgotten again in a month's time, 
Gilbert bears convincing testimony. ' My brother's 
allowance and mine was ;£"] per annum each, and 
during the whole time this family concern lasted, which 
was four years, as well as during the preceding period 
at Lochlea, his expenses never in any one year exceeded 
his slender income. His temperance and frugality were 
everything that could be wished.' 

Honest, however, as Burns's resolution was, it was 
not to be expected that he would — or, indeed, could — 
give up the practice of poetry, or cease to indulge in 
dreams of after-greatness. Poetry, as he has already 
told us, had become the spontaneous expression of his 
heart. It was his natural speech. His thoughts 
appeared almost to demand poetry as their proper 
vehicle of expression, and rhythmed into verse as 
inevitably as in chemistry certain solutions solidify 
in crystals. Besides this. Burns was conscious of his 
abilities. He had measured himself with his fellows, 
and knew his superiority. More than likely he had 
been measuring himself with the writers he had studied, 
and found himself not inferior. The great misfortune 
of his life, as he confessed himself, was never to have 



36 FAMOUS SCOTS 

an aim. He had felt early some stirrings of ambition, 
but they were like gropings of Homer's Cyclops round 
the walls of his cave. Now, however, we have come 
to a period of his life when he certainly did have an 
aim, but necessity compelled him to renounce it as 
soon as it was recognised. It was not a question of 
ploughing or poetry. There was no alternative. How- 
ever insidiously inclination might whisper of poetry, 
duty's voice called him to the fields, and that voice he 
determined to obey. Reading farming books and 
calculating crops is not a likely road to perfection in 
poetry. Yet, in spite of all noble resolution, the voice 
of Poesy was sweet, and he could not shut his ears to it. 
He might sing a song to himself, even though it were 
but to cheer him after the labours of the day, and he 
sang of love in ' the genuine language of his heart.' 

' There's nought but care on every hand. 
In every hour that passes, O : 
What signifies the life o' man. 
An' 'twere na for the lasses, O?' 

For song must come in spite of him. The caged 
lark sings, though its field be but a withered sod, and the 
sky above it a square foot of green baize. Nor was his 
commonplace book neglected ; and in August we come 
upon an entry which shows that poetical aspirations were 
again possessing him ; this time not to be cast forth, 
either at the timorous voice of Prudence or the im- 
portunate bidding of Poverty. Burns has calmly and 
critically taken stock — so to speak — of his literary 
aptitudes and abilities, and recognised his fitness for a 
place in the ranks of Scotland's poets. ' However I am 
pleased with the works of our Scotch poets, particularly 
the excellent Ramsay, and the still more excellent 



ROBERT BURNS 37 

Fergusson, yet I am Iiurt to see other places of 
Scotland, their towns, rivers, woods, haughs, etc., im- 
mortalised in such celebrated performances, whilst my 
dear native country, the ancient Bailieries of Carrick, 
Kyle, and Cunningham, famous both in ancient and 
modern times for a gallant and warlike race of inhabit- 
ants; a country where civil and particularly religious 
liberty have ever found their first support and their 
last asylum, a country the birthplace of many famous 
philosophers, soldiers, and statesmen, and the scene of 
many important events in Scottish history, particularly a 
great many of the actions of the glorious Wallace, the 
saviour of his country ; yet we have never had one 
Scottish poet of any eminence to make the fertile banks 
of Irvine, the romantic woodlands and sequestered 
scenes of Aire, and the heathy mountainous source and 
winding sweep of Doon, emulate Tay, Forth, Ettrick, 
Tweed, etc. This is a complaint I would gladly remedy ; 
but, alas ! I am far unequal to the task, both in native 
genius and education. Obscure I am, and obscure I 
must be, though no young poet nor young soldier's 
heart ever beat more fondly for fame than mine.' The 
same thoughts and aspirations are echoed later in his 
Epistle to William Simpson — 

' Ramsay and famous Fergusson 
Gied Forth and Tay a lift aboon ; 
Yarrow and Tweed, to mony a tune, 

Owre Scotland rings, 
While Irwin, Lugar, Ayr, and Doon, 

Naebody sings. 



We'll gar our streams and burnies shine 
Up \vi' the best ! ' 



38 FAMOUS SCOTS 

The dread of obscurity spoken of here was ahnost a 
weakness with Burns. We hear it Hke an ever-recurring 
wail in his poems and letters. In the very next entry 
in his commonplace book, after praising the old bards, 
and drawing a parallel between their sources of inspira- 
tion and his own, he shudders to think that his fate may be 
such as theirs. ' Oh mortifying to a bard's vanity, their 
very names are buried in the wreck of things that were !' 

Close on the heels of these entries came troubles on 
the head of the luckless poet, troubles more serious 
than bad seed and late harvests. During the summer 
of 1784, we know that he was in bad health, and again 
subject to melancholy. His verses at this time are of a 
religious cast, serious and sombre, the confession of 
fault, and the cry of repentance. 

' Thou know'st that Thou hast formM me 

With passions wild and strong ; 
And listening to their witching voice 
Has often led me wrong.' 

Perhaps this is only the prelude to his verses to 
Rankine, written towards the close of the year, and his 
poem, A Poet's Welcome. They must at least be all 
read together, if we are to have any clear conception of 
the nature of Burns. It is not enough to select his 
Epistle to Rankhie, and speak of its unbecoming levity. 
This was the time when Burns was first subjected to 
ecclesiastical discipline ; and some of his biographers 
have tried to trace the origin of that wonderful series of 
satires, written shortly afterwards, to the vengeful feelings 
engendered in the poet by this degradation. But Burns's 
attack on the effete and corrupt ceremonials of the 
Church was not a burst of personal rancour and bitter- 



ROBERT BURNS 39 

ness. The attack came of something far deeper and 
nobler, and was bound to be delivered sooner or later. 
His own personal experience, and the experience of his 
worthy landlord, Gavin Hamilton, may have given the 
occasion, but the cause of the attack was in the Church 
itself, and in Burns's inborn loathing of humbug, hypo- 
crisy, and cant. 

Well was it the satires were written by so powerful a 
satirist, that the Church purged itself of the evil thing 
and cleansed its ways. This, however, is an episode of 
such importance in the life of Burns, and in the religious 
history of Scotland, as to require to be taken up care- 
fully and considered by itself. 



CHAPTER III 

THE SERIES OF SATIRES 

Before we can clearly see and understand Burns's 
attitude to the Church, we must have studied the nature 
of the man himself, and we must know something also of 
his religious training. It will not be enough to select 
his series of satires, and, from a study of them alone, 
try to make out the character of the man. His previous 
life must be known ; the natural bent of his mind ap- 
prehended, and once that is grasped, these satires will 
appeal to the heart and understanding of the reader 
with a sense of naturalness and expectedness. They are 
as inevitable as his love lyrics, and are read with the 
conviction that his merciless exposure of profanity mas- 
querading in the habiliments of religion, was part of the 
life-work and mission of this great poet. He had been 
born, it is recognised, not only to sing the loves and joys 
and sorrows of his fellow men and women, but to purge 
their lives of grossness, and their religion of the filth of 
hypocrisy and cant. Let it be admitted, that he himself 
went * a kennin wrang.' What argument is there ? We 
do not deny the divine mission of Samson because of 
Delilah. Surely that giant's life was a wasted one, yet 
in his very death he was true to his mission, and ful- 
filled the purpose of his birth. In other lands and in 



ROBERT BURNS 41 

other times the satirist is recognised and his work ap- 
praised; the abuses he scourged, the pretensions he 
ridiculed, are seen in all their hideousness ; but when a 
great satirist arises amongst ourselves to probe the ulcers 
of Pharisaism, he is banned as a profaner of holy things, 
touching with impious hands the ark of the covenant. 
Why should the doth — as it is so ingenuously called — 
be touched with delicate hands, unless it be that it is 
shoddy ? Yet the man who would stand well in the 
eyes of society must not whisper a word against pharisa- 
ism ; for the Pharisee is a highly respectable person, and 
observes the proprieties ; he typifies the conventional 
righteousness and religion of his time. 

Let us have done with all this timidity and coward 
tenderness. If the Church is filthy, it must be cleansed ; 
if there be money-changers within its gates, let them be 
driven out with a whip of small cords. This awe of the 
doth, not yet stamped out in Scotland, is but the remains 
of a pagan superstition, and has nothing to do with 
the manliness and courage of true religion. But pro- 
phets have no honour in their own country, rarely in 
their own time ; they have ever been persecuted, and it 
is the Church's martyrs that have handed down through 
the ages the light of the world. 

The profanities and religious blasphemies Burns at- 
tacked were evils insidious and poisonous, eating to the 
very heart of the religious life of the country, and they 
required a desperate remedy. Let us be thankful that 
the remedy was applied in time ; and, looking to the 
righteousness he wrought, let us bless the name of 
Burns. 

Burns's father, stern and severe moralist as he was, 



42 FAMOUS SCOTS 

was not a strict Calvinist. Anyone who takes the 
trouble to read ' The Manual of Religious Belief in a 
Dialogue between Father and Son, compiled by William 
Burness, Farmer, Mount Oliphant, and transcribed with 
Grammatical Corrections by John Murdoch, Teacher,' 
will see that the man was of too loving and kindly a 
nature to be strictly orthodox. What was rigid and 
unlovely to him in the Calvinism of the Scottish Church 
of that day has been here softened down into some- 
thing not very far from Arminianism. He had had a 
hard experience in the world himself, and that may have 
drawn him nearer to his suffering fellow-men and into 
closer communion with his God. He had learned that 
religion is a thing of the spirit, and not a matter of 
creeds and catechisms. Of Robert Burns's own religion 
it would be impertinent to inquire too curiously. The 
religion of a man is not to be paraded before the public 
like the manifesto of a party politician. After all, is 
there a single man who can sincerely, without equivoca- 
tion or mental reservation, label himself Calvinist, 
Arminian, Socinian, or Pelagian? If there be, his 
mind must be a marvel of mathematical nicety and 
nothing more. All that we need know of Burns is 
that he was naturally and sincerely religious ; that he 
worshipped an all-loving Father, and believed in an 
ever-present God ; that his charity was boundless ; that 
he loved what was good and true, and hated with an 
indignant hatred whatever was loathsome and false. 
He loved greatly his fellow-creatures, man and beast 
and flower; he could even find something to pity in 
the fate of the devil himself. That he was not ortho- 
dox, in the narrow interpretation of orthodoxy in his 



ROBERT BURNS 43 

day, we are well enough aware, else had he not been 
the poet we love and cherish. 

In his early days at Mount OHphant there is a hint 
of these later satires. 'Polemical divinity about this 
time was,' he says, 'putting the country half-mad, and 
I, ambitious of shining on Sundays, between sermons, 
in conversation parties, at funerals, etc., in a few years 
more, used to puzzle Calvinism with so much heat and 
indiscretion that I raised a hue and cry of heresy against 
ine,-which has not ceased to this hour.' And heresy is a 
terrible cry to raise against a man in Scotland. In 
those days it was Anathema-maranatha ; even now it is 
still the war-slogan of the Assemblies. 

The polemical divinity which he refers to as putting 
the country half-mad was the wordy war that was being 
carried on at that time between the Auld Lights and the 
New Lights. These New Lights, as they were called, 
were but a birth of the social and religious upheaval that 
was going on in Scotland and elsewhere. The spirit of 
revolution was abroad : in France it became acutely 
political; in Scotland there was a desire for greater 
religious freedom. The Church, as reformed by Knox, 
was requiring to be re-reformed. The yoke of papacy 
had been lifted certainly, but the yoke of pseudo- 
Protestantism which had taken its place was quite as 
heavy on the necks of the people. So long as it had 
been new ; so long as it had been of their own choosing, 
it had been endured willingly. But a generation was 
springing up — stiff-necked they might have been called, 
in that they fretted under the yoke of their fathers — 
that sought to be delivered from the tyranny of their 
pastors and the fossilised formalism of their creed. To 



44 FAMOUS SCOTS 

the people in their bondage a prophet was born, and 
that prophet was Robert Burns, 

It was natural that a man of Burns's temperament and 
clearness of perception should be on the side of the 
'common-sense' party. In one of his letters to Mr. 
James Burness, Montrose, wherein he describes the 
strange doings of a strange sect called the Buchanites, — 
surely in itself a convincing proof of the degeneracy of 
the times in the matter of religion, — we have an in- 
teresting reflection which gives us some insight into the 
poet's mind. ' This, my dear Sir, is one of the many 
instances of the folly in leaving the guidance of sound 
reason and common sense in matters of religion. When- 
ever we neglect or despise those sacred monitors, the 
whimsical notions of a perturbed brain are taken for the 
immediate influences of the Deity, and the wildest 
fanaticism and the most inconsistent absurdities will 
meet with abettors and converts. Nay, I have often 
thought that the more out of the way and ridiculous 
their fancies are, if once they are sanctified under the 
name of religion, the unhappy, mistaken votaries are the 
more firmly glued to them.' 

The man who wrote that was certainly not the man, 
when the day of battle came, to join himself with the 
orthodox party, the party that stuck to the pure, un- 
diluted Puritanism of Covenanting times. Yet many 
biographers have not seen the bearing that such a letter 
has on Burns's attitude to the Church. Principal Shairp 
seems to say that Burns, had it not been for the acci- 
dent of ecclesiastical discipline to which he had been 
subjected, would have joined the orthodox party. The 
notion is absurd. Burns had attacked orthodox Cal- 



ROBERT BURNS 45 

vinism even in his boyhood, and was already tainted 
with heresy. * These men,' the worthy Principal informs 
us, 'were democratic in their ecclesiastical views, and 
stout protesters against patronage. All Burns's instincts 
would naturally have been on the side of those who 
wished to resist patronage and "cowe the lairds" had 
not this, his natural tendency, been counteracted by a 
stronger bias drawing him in an opposite direction.' 
This is a narrowing — if not even a positive misconcep- 
tion — of the case with a vengeance. The question was 
not of patronage at all, but of moral and religious 
freedom; while the democracy of those ministers was 
a terribly one-sided democracy. The lairds may have 
dubbed them democrats, but they were aristocratic 
enough, despotic even, to their herds. But Principal 
Shairp has been led altogether wrong by imagining that 
'Burns, smarting under the strict church discipline, 
naturally threw himself into the arms of the opposite 
or New Light party, who were more easy in their life 
and in their doctrine.' More charitable also, and Christ- 
like in their judgments, I should fain hope; less blinded 
by a superstitious awe of the Church, ' Nothing could 
have been more unfortunate,' he continues, 'than that 
in this crisis of his career he should have fallen into 
intimacy with those hard-headed but coarse-minded 
men.' Surely this zeal for the Church has carried him 
too far. Were these men all coarse minded ? Nobody 
believes it. The coarse-minded Dr. Dalrymple of Ayr, 
and the coarse-minded Mr. Lawrie of Loudon ! This is 
not argument. Besides, it is perfectly gratuitous. The 
question, again, is not one of men — that ecclesiastical 
discipline has been an offence and a stumbling-block — 



46 FAMOUS SCOTS 

either coarse minded or otherwise. It is a question of prin- 
ciple, and Burns fought for it with keen-edged weapons. 
It would be altogether a mistake to identify Burns 
with the New Light party, or with any other sect. He 
was a law unto himself in religion, and would bind him- 
self by no creed. Because he attacked rigid orthodoxy 
as upheld by Auld Light doctrine, that does not at all 
mean that he was espousing, through thick and thin, the 
cause of the New Light party. He fought in his own 
name, with his own weapons, and for humanity. It 
ought to be clearly understood that in his series of 
satires he was not attacking the orthodoxy of the Auld 
Lights from the bulwarks of any other creed. His 
criticism was altogether destructive. From his own 
conception of a wise and loving God he satirised what 
he conceived to be their irrational and inhuman con- 
ception of Deity, whose attitude towards mankind was 
assuredly not that of a father to his children. Burns's 
God was a God of love ; the god they worshipped was 
the creation of their creed, a god of election. It is 
quite true that Burns made many friends amongst the 
New Lights, but we are certain he did not hold by all 
their tenets or subscribe to their doctrine. In the 
Didionajy of National Biography we read : ' Burns 
represented the revolt of a virile and imaginative 
nature against a system of belief and practice which, 
as he judged, had degenerated into mere bigotry and 
Pharisaism. . . . That Burns, like Carlyle, who at once 
retained the sentiment and rejected the creed of his race 
more decidedly than Burns, could sympathise with the 
higher religious sentiments of his class is proved by The 
Coller''s Saturday Night.'' 



ROBERT BURNS 47 

Principal Shairp, however, has not seen the matter in 
this broad light. All he sees is a man of keen insight 
and vigorous powers of reasoning, who ' has not only his 
own , quarrel with the parish minister and the stricter 
clergy to revenge, but the quarrel also of his friend and 
landlord, Gavin Hamilton, a county lawyer who had 
fallen under church censure for neglect of church ordin- 
ances,' — a question of new potatoes in fact, — 'and had 
been debarred from the communion.' 

It is pleasing to see that the academic spirit is not 
always so blinding and blighting. Professor Blackie 
recognises that the abuses Burns castigated were real 
abuses, and admits that the verdict of time has been in 
his favour. * In the case of Holy Willie and The Holy 
Fair,^ he remarks, ' the lash was wisely and effectively 
wielded'; and on another occasion he wrote, 'Though 
a sensitive pious mind will naturally shrink from the 
bold exposure of devout abuses in holy things, in The 
Holy Fair and other similar satires, on a broad view of 
the matter we cannot but think that the castigation was 
reasonable, and the man who did it showed an amount 
of independence, frankness, and moral courage that 
amply compensates for the rudeness of the assault.' 

Rude, the assault certainly was and overwhelming. 
Augean stables are not to be cleansed with a spray of 
rose-water. 

Lockhart, whilst recognising the force and keenness 
of these satires, has regretfully pointed out that the very 
things Burns satirised were part of the same religious 
system which produced the scenes described in The 
Cotter's Saturday Night. But is this not really the 
explanation of the whole matter? It was just because 



48 FAMOUS SCOTS 

Burns had seen the beauty of true reb'gion at home, that 
he was fired to fight to the death what was false and 
rotten. It was the cause of true religion that he 
espoused. 

' All hail religion ! Maid divine, 
Pardon a muse so mean as mine, 
Who in her rough imperfect line 
Thus dares to name thee. 
To stigmatise false friends of thine 
Can ne'er defame thee.' 

Compare the reading of the sacred page, when the 
family is gathered round the ingle, and ' the sire turns 
o'er with patriarchal grace the big ha'-bible ' and * wales 
a portion with judicious care,' with the reading of 
Peebles frae the Water fit — 

' See, up he's got the word o' God, 
And meek and mim has viewed it.' 

What a contrast ! The two readings are as far apart 
as is heaven from hell, as far as the true from the 
false. It is strange that both Lockhart and Shairp 
should have stumbled on the explanation of Burns's 
righteous satire in these poems ; should have been so 
near it, and yet have missed it. It was just because 
Burns could write The Cotter's Saturday Night that he 
could write The Holy Tulzie, Holy Willie's Prayer, The 
Ordination, and The Holy Fair. Had he not felt the 
beauty of that family worship at home ; had he not seen 
the purity and holiness of true religion, how could such 
scenes as those described in The Holy Fair, or such 
hypocrisy as Holy Willie's, ever have moved him to 
scathing satire? Where was the poet's indignation to 



ROBERT BURNS 49 

come from ? That is not to be got by tricks of rhyme 
or manufactured by rules of metre ; but let it be alive 
and burning in the heart of the poet, and all else will 
be added unto him for the perfect poem, as it was to 
Burns. That Burns, though he wrote in humorous 
satire, was moved to the writing by indignation, he tells 
us in his epistle to the Rev. John M'Math — 

' But I gae mad at their grimaces. 
Their sighin', cantin', grace-prood faces, 
Their three-mile prayers, and half-mile graces, 

Their raxin' conscience, 
Whase greed, revenge, and pride disgraces 

Waur nor their nonsense.' 

The first of Burns's satires, if we except his epistle to 
John Goudie, wherein we have a hint of the acute differ- 
ences of the time, is his poem Tlie Twa Herds, or 
The Holy Tulzie. The two herds were the Rev. John 
Russell and the Rev, Alexander Moodie, both afterwards 
mentioned in The Holy Fair. These reverend gentle- 
men, so long sworn friends, bound by a common bond 
of enmity against a certain New Light minister of the 
name of Lindsay, *had a bitter black outcast,' and, in 
the words of Lockhart, ' abused each other coram populo 
with a fiery virulence of personal invective such as has 
long been banished from all popular assemblies.' This 
degrading spectacle of two priests ordained to preach 
the gospel of love, attacking each other with all the 
rancour of malice and uncharitableness, and foaming 
with the passion of a pothouse, was too flagrant an 
occasion for satire for Burns to miss. He held them 
up to ridicule in The Holy Tulzie, and showed them 
themselves as others saw them. It has been objected 
4 



50 FAMOUS SCOTS 

by some that Burns made use of humorous satire ; did 
not censure with the fiery fervour of a righteous indig- 
nation. Burns used the weapon he could handle best ; 
and a powerful weapon it is in the hands of a master. 
We acknowledge Horace's satires to be scathing enough, 
though they are light and delicate, almost trifling and 
fl.ippant at times. He has not the volcanic utterance of 
Juvenal, but I doubt not his castigations were quite as 
effective. ' Quamquam ridentem dicere verum quid 
vetat?' Burns might have well replied to his censors 
with the same question. Quick on the heels of this 
poem came Holy Willie s Prayer, wherein he took up 
the cudgels for his friend, Mr. Gavin Hamilton, and 
fought for him in his own enthusiastic way. The satire 
here is so scathing and scarifying that we can only read 
and wonder, shuddering the while for the wretched 
creature so pitilessly flayed. Not a word is wasted ; 
not a line without weight. The character of the self- 
righteous, sensual, spiteful Pharisee is a merciless ex- 
posure, and, hardest of all, the picture is convincing. 
For Burns believed in his own mind that these men. 
Holy Willie and the crew he typified, were thoroughly 
dishonest. They were not in his judgment — and Burns 
had keen insight — mere bigots dehumanised by their 
creed, but a pack of scheming, calculating scoundrels. 

'They take religion in their mouth, 
They talk o' mercy, grace, and truth, 
For what? to gie their malice skouth 

On some puir wight, 
And hunt him down, o'er right and ruth 
To ruin straight.' 

But it must be noted in Holy Willie that the poet is 



ROBERT BURNS 51 

not letting himself out in a burst of personal spleen. 
He is again girding at the rigidity of a lopped and 
maimed Calvinism, and attacking the creed through the 
man. The poem is a living presentment of the undiluted, 
puritanic doctrine of the Auld Light party, to whom 
Calvinism meant only a belief in hell and an assurance 
of their own election. It is evident that Burns was not 
sound on either essential. The Address to the Ufico 
Guid is a natural sequel to this poem, and, in a sense, 
its culmination. There is the same strength of satire, 
but now it is more delicate and the language more 
dignified. There is the same condemnation of phari- 
saism ; but the poem rises to a higher level in its appeal 
for charitable views of human frailty, and its kindly 
counsel to silence ; judgment is to be left to Him who 

'Knows each cord, its various tone, 
Each spring its various bias.' 

Of all the series of satires, however. The Holy Fair is 
the most remarkable. It is in a sense a summing up of 
all the others that preceded it. The picture it gives of 
the mixed and motley multitude fairing in the church- 
yard at Mauchline, with a relay of ministerial mounte- 
banks catering for their excitement, is true to the hfe. 
It is begging the question to deplore that Burns was 
provoked to such an attack. The scene was provocation 
sufficient to any right-thinking man who associated the 
name of religion with all that was good and beautiful 
and true. Such a state of things demanded reformation. 
The churchyard — that holy ground on which the church 
was built and sanctified by the dust of pious and saintly 
men — cried aloud against the desecration to which it 



52 FAMOUS SCOTS 

was subjected ; and Burns, who alone had the power to 
purify it from such profanities, would have been untrue 
to himself and a traitor to the religion of his country 
had he merely shrugged his shoulders and allowed things 
to go on as they were going. And after all what was the 
result ? For the poem is part and parcel of the end it 
achieved. ' There is a general feeling in Ayrshire,' says 
Chambers, * that The Holy Fair was attended with a good 
effect ; for since its appearance the custom of resorting 
to the occasion in neighbouring parishes for the sake of 
holiday-making has been much abated and a great in- 
crease of decorous observance has taken place.' To that 
nothing more need be added. 

In this series of satires The Address to the Deil ought 
also to be included. Burns had no belief at all in that 
Frankenstein creation. It was too bad, he thought, to 
invent such a monster for the express purpose of im- 
puting to him all the wickedness of the world. If such 
a creature existed, he was rather sorry for the maligned 
character, and inclined to think that there might be 
mercy even for him. 

' I'm wae to think upon yon den, 
Even for your sake.' 

Speaking of this address, Auguste Angellier says : ' All 
at once in their homely speech they heard the devil 
addressed not only without awe, but with a spice of 
good-fellowship and friendly familiarity. They had 
never heard the devil spoken of in this tone before. It 
was a charming address, jocund, full of raillery and good- 
humour, with a dash of friendliness, as if the two speakers 
had been cronies and companions ready to jog along 



ROBERT BURNS 53 

arm in arm to the nether regions. He simply laughs 
Satan out of countenance, turns him to ridicule, pokes 
his fun at him, scolds and defies him just as he might 
have treated a person from whom he had nothing to 
fear. Nor is that all. He must admonish him, tell him 
he has been naughty long enough, and wind up by 
giving him some good advice, counselling him to mend 
his ways. This was certainly without theological pre- 
cedent. It was, however, a simple idea which would 
have arranged matters splendidly. . . . Even to-day to 
speak well of the devil is an abomination almost as 
serious as to speak evil of the Deity. There was 
assuredly a great fortitude of mind as well as daring of 
conduct to write such a piece as this.' 

The poem has done more than anything else to kill 
the devil of superstition in Scotland. After his death 
he found, it is averred, a quiet resting-place in Kirkcaldy, 
where pious people have built a church on his grave. 

When Burns later in life made the witches and war- 
locks dance to the piping of the devil in Alloway's auld 
haunted kirk, he was but assembling them in their fit 
and proper house of meeting. Here had they been 
called into being ; here had they the still-born children 
of superstition been thrashed into life and trained in 
unholiness. One can imagine them oozing out from the 
walls that had echoed their names so often through 
centuries of Sabbath days. The devil himself, by virtue 
of his rank, takes his place in the east, rising we have no 
doubt from the very spot on which the pulpit once had 
stood. In the church had superstition exorcised this 
hellish legion out of the dead mass of ignorance into the 
swarming maggots that batten on corruption ; and it was 



54 FAMOUS SCOTS 

in accordance with the eternal fitness of things that here 
their spirits should abide, and, when they took bodily 
shape, that they should assume the form and feature in 
which their mother Superstition had conceived them. 

Upon the holy table too lay ' twa span-lang wee un- 
christened bairns.' For this hell the poet pictures is the 
creation of a creed that throngs it with the souls of 
innocent babes. ' Suffer little children to come unto 
me,' Christ had said; 'for of such is the kingdom of 
heaven.' ' But unbaptized children must come unto 
me,' the devil of superstition said ; * for of such is the 
kingdom of hell.' 

What pathos is in this line of Burns ! There is in its 
slow spondaic movement an eternity of tears. Could 
satire or sermon have shown more forcibly the revolting 
inhumanity of a doctrine upheld as divine ? Yet were 
there devout men, in other things gentle and loving and 
charitable, who preached this as the law of a loving God. 
With one stroke of genius they were brought face to face 
with the logical sequence of their barbarous teaching, 
and that without a word of coarseness or a touch of 
caricature. 

Only once again did Burns return to this attack on 
bigotry and superstition, and that was when he was in- 
duced to fight for Dr. Macgill in The Kirk's Alarm. 
But he had done his part in the series of satires of this 
year to expose the loathsomeness of hypocrisy and to 
purge holy places and the most solemn ceremonies of 
what was blasphemous and grossly profane. That in 
this Burns was fulfilling a part of his mission as a poet, 
we can hardly doubt ; and that his work wrought for 
righteousness, the purer religious life that followed 



ROBERT BURNS 55 

amply proves. The true poet is also a prophet ; and 
Robert Burns was a prophet when he spoke forth boldly 
and fearlessly the truth that was in him, and dared to 
say that sensuality was foul even in an elder of the kirk, 
and that profanities were abhorred of God even though 
sanctioned and sanctified under the sacred name of 
religion. 



CHAPTER IV 



THE KILMARNOCK EDITION 



The Holy Tulzie had been written probably in April 
1785, and the greatest of the satires, The Holy Fair^ is 
dated August of the same year. It may, however, have 
been only drafted, and partly written, when the recent 
celebration of the sacrament at Mauchline was fresh in 
the poet's mind. At the very latest, it must have been 
taken up, completed, and perfected, in the early months 
of 1786. That is a period of some ten months between 
the first and the last of this series of satires ; and during 
that time he had composed Holy Willie's Prayer, The 
Address to the Deil, The Ordination, and The Address to 
the Unco Gtdd. But this represents a very small part of 
the poetry written by Burns during this busy period. 
From the spring of 1785 on to the autumn of 1786 was 
a time of great productiveness in his life, a productiveness 
unparalleled in the life of any other poet. If, according 
to Gilbert, the seven years of their stay at Lochlea were 
not marked by much literary improvement in his brother, 
we take it that the poet had been ' lying fallow ' all those 
years ; and what a rich harvest do we have now ! Here, 
indeed, was a reward worth waiting for. To read over 
the names of the poems, songs, and epistles written 

within such a short space of time amazes us. And there 

56 



ROBERT BURNS 57 

is hardly a poem in the whole collection without a claim 
to literary excellence. A month or two previous to the 
composition of his first satire he had written what Gilbert 
calls his first poem, The Epistle to Davie, ' a brother poet, 
lover, ploughman, and fiddler.' It is worthy of notice 
that, in the opening lines of this poem — 

'While winds frae aff Ben Lomond blaw, 
And bar the doors wi' driving snaw, 
And hing us ower the ingle ' — 

we see the poet and his surroundings, as he sets himself 
down to write. He plunges, as Horace advises, in medias 
res, and we have the atmosphere of the poem in the first 
phrase. This is Burns's usual way of beginning his 
poems and epistles, as well as a great many of his songs. 
The metre of this poem Burns has evidently taken from 
The Cherry and the Slae, by Alexander Montgomery, 
which he must have read in Ramsay's Evergreen. The 
stanza is rather complicated, although Burns, with his 
extraordinary command and pliancy of language, uses it 
from the first with masterly ease. But there is much 
more than mere jugglery of words in the poem. Indeed, 
such is this poet's seeming simplicity of speech that his 
masterly manipulation of metres always comes as an 
afterthought. It never disturbs us in our first reading 
of the poem. Gilbert's opinion of this poem is worth 
recording, the more especially as he expressly tells us 
that the first idea of Robert's becoming an author was 
started on this occasion. 'I thought it,' he says, *at 
least equal to, if not superior, to many of Allan Ramsay's 
epistles, and that the merit of these and much other 
Scottish poetry seemed to consist principally in the knack 



58 FAMOUS SCOTS 

of the expression ; but here there was a strain of interest- 
ing sentiment, and the Scotticism of the language scarcely 
seemed affected, but appeared to be the natural language 
of the poet.' It startles us to hear Gilbert talking thus 
of the Scotticism, after having heard so much of Robert 
Burns writing naturally in the speech of his home and 
county. In this poem we have, at least, the first proof 
of that graphic power in which Burns has never been 
excelled, and in it we have the earliest mention of his 
Bonnie Jean. In his next poem, Death and Dr. 
Hornbook, his command of language and artistic phrasing 
are more apparent, while pawky humour and genial satire 
sparkle and flash from every line. The poem is written 
in that form of verse which Burns has made particularly 
his own. He had become acquainted with it, it is most 
likely, in the writings of Fergusson, Ramsay, and Gilbert- 
field, who had used it chiefly for comic subjects; but 
Burns showed that, in his hands at least, it could be made 
the vehicle of the most pensive and tender feeling. In 
an interesting note to the Cenfe?tary Burets, edited by 
Henley and Henderson, it is pointed out that ' the six- 
line stave in rime couee built on two rhymes,' was used 
by the Troubadours in their Chansons de Gesies, and that 
it dates at the very latest from the eleventh century. 
Burns's happiest use of it was in those epistles which 
about this time he began to dash off to some of his friends ; 
and it is with these epistles that the uninterrupted stream 
of poetry of this season may be said properly to begin. 
Perhaps it was in the use of this stanza that Burns first 
discovered his command of rhymes and his felicity of 
phrasing. Certain it is, that after his first epistle to 
Lapraik, we have epistles, poems, songs, satires flowing 



ROBERT BURNS 59 

from his pen, uninterrupted for a period, and apparently 
with marvellous ease. It has to be remembered, too, 
that he was now inspired by the dream of becoming an 
author — in print. When or where or how, had not been 
determined ; but the idea was delightful all the same ; the 
hope was inspiration itself. Some day his work would 
be published, and he would be read and talked about ! 
He would have done something for poor auld Scotland's 
sake. The one thing now was to make the book, and to 
that he set himself deliberately. Poetry was at last to 
have its chance. Farming had been tried, with little 
success. The crops of 1784 had been a failure, and this 
year they were hardly more promising. In these dis- 
couraging circumstances the poet was naturally driven in 
upon himself. His eyes were turned adintra, and he 
sought consolation in his Muse. He was conscious of 
some poetical ability, and he knew that his compositions 
were not destitute of merit. Poetry, too, was to him, and 
particularly so at this time, its own exceeding great reward. 
He rhymed ' for fun ' ; and probably he was finding in 
the exercise that excitement his passionate nature craved. 
Herein was his stimulant after the routine of farm-work 
— spiritless work that was little better than slavery, in- 
cessant and achieving nothing. We can imagine him in 
those days returning from the fields, ' forjesket, sair, with 
weary legs,' and becoming buoyant as soon as he has 
opened the drawer of that small deal table in the garret. 

' Leeze me on rhyme ! it's aye a treasure. 
My chief, amaist, my only pleasure ; 
At hame, afield, at wark or leisure, 

The Muse, poor hizzie, 
Though rough and raploch be her measure, 
She's seldom lazy/ 



6o FAMOUS SCOTS 

But, lazy or not, she becomes ' ramfeezled ' with con- 
stant work, when he vows if ' the thowless jad winna mak 
it clink,' to prose it, — a terrible threat. For he must 
write, though it be but to keep despondency at arm's 
length. Yet it had become more than a pleasure and a 
recreation to him ; and this he was beginning to under- 
stand. This, after all, was his real work, not the drudgery 
of the fields ; in it he must live his life, and fulfil his 
mission. The more he wrote the more he accustomed 
himself with the idea of being an author. He knew that 
the critic-folk, deep read in books, might scoff at the very 
suggestion of a ploughman turning poet, but he recog- 
nised also that they might be wrong. It was not by dint 
of Greek that Parnassus was to be climbed. * Ae spark 
o' Nature's fire ' was the one thing needful for poetry that 
was to touch the heart. 

' The star that rules my luckless lot, 
Has fated me the russet coat, 
And damned my fortune to the groat ; 

But, in requit, 
Has blest me with a random shot 

O' countra wit. 

This while my notion's ta'en a sklent, 
To try my fate in guid, black prent ; 
But still the mair I'm that way bent, 

Something cries, " Hoolie ! 
I red you, honest man, tak tent ! 

Ye'll shaw your folly. 

" There's ither poets, much your betters, 
Far seen in Greek, deep men o' letters, 
Hae thought they had ensured their debtors, 

A' future ages ; 
Now moths deform in shapeless tatters 

Their unknown pages." ' 



ROBERT BURNS 6i 

The works of such scholars enjoyed of the moths ! There 
is gentle satire here. They themselves had grubbed on 
Greek, and now is Time avenged. 

It is in his epistles that we see Burns most vividly 
and clearly, the man in all his moods. They are just 
such letters as might be written to intimate friends 
when one is not afraid of being himself, and can speak 
freely. In sentiment they are candid and sincere, and 
in language transparently unaffected. Whatever occurs 
to him as he writes goes down ; we have the thoughts 
of his heart at the time of writing, and see the varying 
expressions of his face as he passes from grave to gay, 
from lively to severe. Now he is tender, now indignant ; 
now rattling along in good-natured raillery without 
broadening into burlesque; now becoming serious and 
pensively philosophic without a suggestion of mawkish 
morality. For Burns, when he is himself, is always an 
artist; says his say, and lets the moral take care of 
itself; and in his epistles he lets himself go in a very 
revelry of artistic abandon. He does not think of 
style — that fetich of barren minds — and style comes to 
him ; for style is a coquette that flies the suppliant 
wooer to kiss the feet of him who worships a goddess ; 
a submissive handmaiden, a wayward and moody 
mistress. But along with deHcacy of diction, force and 
felicity of expression, pregnancy of phrase and pliancy 
of language, what knowledge there is of men — the 
passions that sway, the impulses that prompt, the 
motives that move them to action. Clearness of 
vision and accuracy of observation are evidenced in 
their vividness of imagery; naturalness and truthful- 
ness — the first essential of all good writing — in their 



62 FAMOUS SCOTS 

convincing sincerity of sentiment. Wit and humour, 
play and sparkle of fancy, satire genial or scathing, a 
boundless love of nature and all created things, are 
harmoniously unified in the glowing imagination of 
the poet, and welded into the perfect poem. Behind 
all is the personality of the writer, captivating the 
reader as much by his kindliness and sympathy as by 
his witchery of words. Others have attempted poetic 
epistles, but none has touched familiar intercourse to 
such fine issues; none has written with such natural 
grace or woven the warp and woof of word and senti- 
ment so cunningly into the web of poetry as Robert 
Burns. Looseness of rhythm may be detected, excrucia- 
ting rhymes are not awanting, but all are forgiven and 
forgotten in the enjoyment of the feast as a whole. 

Besides the satires and epistles we have during this 
fertile period poems as different in subject, sentiment, 
and treatment as The Cotter's Saturday Night and 
The Jolly Beggars; Hallowe^en and The Mountain 
Daisy ; The Farmer's Address to his Auld Mare Maggie 
and The Twa Dogs ; Address to a Mouse, Man was 
viade to Mourn, The Vision, A Winter's Night, and The 
Epistle to a Young Friend. Perhaps of all these poems 
The Fision is the most important. It is an epoch- 
marking poem in the poet's life. All that he had 
previously written had been leading to this ; the finer 
the poem the more surely was it bringing him to this 
composition. The time was bound to come when he 
had to settle for himself finally and firmly what his 
work in life was to be. Was poetry to be merely a pastime ; 
a recreation after the labours of the day were done ; a 
solace when harvests failed and ruin stared the family 



ROBERT BURNS 63 

in the face ? That question Burns answered when he 
sat down by the ingle-cheek, and, looking backward, 
mused on the years of youth that had been spent * in 
stringing blethers up in rhyme for fools to sing.' He 
saw what he might have been ; he knew too well what 
he was — * half-mad, half-fed, half-sarket.' Yet the 
picture of what he might have been he dismissed 
lightly, almost disdainfully; for he saw what he might 
be yet — what he should be. Turning from the toilsome 
past and the unpromising present, he looked to the 
future with a manly assurance of better things. He 
should shine in his humble sphere, a rustic bard ; 
his to 

' Preserve the dignity of Man, 

With soul erect ; 
And trust, the Universal Plan 
Will all protect.' 

The poem is pitched on a high key ; the keynote is 
struck in the opening lines, and the verses move to 
the end with stateliness and dignity. It is calm, con- 
templative, with that artistic restraint that comes of 
conscious power. Burns took himself seriously, and 
knew that if he were true to his genius he would become 
the poet and prophet of his fellow-men. 

It is worth while dwelling a little on this particular 
poem, because it marks a crisis in Burns's life. At 
this point he shook himself free from the tyranny of the 
soil. He had considered all things, and his resolution 
for authorship was taken. Some of the other poems will 
be mentioned afterwards ; meantime we have to consider 
another crisis in his life — some aspects of his nature less 
pleasing, some episodes in his career dark and unlovely. 



64 FAMOUS SCOTS 

Speaking of the effect Holy Willie^ Prayer had on 
the kirk-session, he says that they actually held three 
meetings to see if their holy artillery could be pointed 
against profane rhymers. ' Unluckily for me,' he adds, 
'my idle wanderings led me on another side, point- 
blank within reach of their heaviest metal. This is the 
unfortunate story alluded to in my printed poem The 
Lament. 'Twas a shocking affair, which I cannot yet 
bear to recollect, and it had very nearly given me one 
or two of the principal qualifications for a place with 
those who have lost the chart and mistaken the reckon- 
ing of rationality.' 

Throughout the year 1785 Burns had been acquainted 
with Jean Armour, the daughter of a master mason in 
Mauchline. Her name, besides being mentioned in 
his Epistle to Davie^ is mentioned in The Visio?t, and 
we know from a verse on the six belles of Mauchline 
that 'Armour was the jewel o' them a'.' From the 
depressing cares and anxieties of that gloomy season 
the poet had turned to seek solace in song, but he had 
also found comfort and consolation in love. 

' When heart-corroding care and grief 
Deprive my soul of rest, 
Her dear idea brings relief 
And solace to my breast.' 

Now in the spring of 1786 Burns as a man of honour 
must acknowledge Jean as his wife. The lovers had im- 
prudently anticipated the Church's sanction to marriage, 
and it was his duty, speaking in the homely phrase of 
the Scottish peasantry, to make an honest woman of 
his Bonnie Jean. But, unfortunately, matters had been 
going from bad to worse on the farm of Mossgiel, and 



ROBERT BURNS 65 

about this time the brothers had come to a final decision 
to quit the farm. Robert, as Gilbert informs us, durst 
not then engage with a family in his poor, unsettled 
state, but was anxious to shield his partner by every 
means in his power from the consequences of their 
imprudence. It was agreed, therefore, between them, 
that they should make a legal acknowledgment of 
marriage, that he should go to Jamaica to push his 
fortune, and that she should remain with her father till 
it should please Providence to put the means of support- 
ing a family in his power. He was willing even to 
work as a common labourer so that he might do his 
duty by the woman he had already made his wife. But 
Jean's father, whatever were his reasons, would allow 
her to have nothing whatever to do with a man like 
Burns. A husband in Jamaica was, in his judgment, 
no husband at all. What inducement he held out, or 
what arguments he used, we may not know, but he 
prevailed on Jean to surrender to him the paper 
acknowledging the irregular marriage. This he de- 
posited with Mr. Aitken of Ayr, who, as Burns heard, 
deleted the names, thus rendering the marriage null 
and void. This was the circumstance, what he regarded 
as Jean's desertion, which brought Burns, as he has 
said, to the verge of insanity. 

Now it was that he finally resolved to leave the 
country. It was not the first time he had thought of 
America. Poverty, before this, had led him to think of 
emigrating; the success of others who had gone out 
as settlers tempted him to try his fortune beyond the 
seas, even though he 'should herd the buckskin kye 
in Virginia.' Now, imprudence as well as poverty urged 
5 



66 FAMOUS SCOTS 

him, while, wounded so sorely by the action of the 
Armours both in his love and his vanity, he had little 
desire to remain at home. There is no doubt that, 
prior to the birth of his twin children and the publication 
of his poems, he would have quitted Scotland with little 
reluctance. But he was so poor that, even after accept- 
ing a situation in Jamaica, he had not money to pay 
his passage; and it was at the suggestion of Gavin 
Hamilton that he began seriously to prepare for the 
publication of his poems by subscription, in order to 
raise a sum sufficient to buy his banishment. Accord- 
ingly we find him under the date April 3, 1786, writing 
to Mr. Aitken, ' My proposals for publishing I am just 
going to send to press.' 

But what a time this was in the poet's life ! It was 
a long tumult of hope and despair, exultation and 
despondency, poetry and love; revelry, rebellion, and 
remorse. Everything was excitement; calmness itself 
a fever. Yet through it all inspiration was ever with 
him, and poem followed poem with miraculous, one 
might almost say, unnatural rapidity. Now he is 
apostrophising Ruin ; now he is wallowing in the mire 
of village scandal; now he is addressing a mountain 
daisy in words of tenderness and purity; now he is 
scarifying a garrulous tailor, and ranting with an alien 
flippancy; now it is Beelzebub he addresses, now the 
King ; now he is waxing eloquent on the virtues of 
Scotch whisky, anon writing to a young friend in words 
of wisdom that might well be written on the fly-leaf of 
his Bible. 

This was certainly a period of ageing activity in 
Burns's life. It seemed as if there had been a con- 



ROBERT BURNS 67 

spiracy of fate and circumstance to herald the birth of 
his poems with the wildest convulsions of labour and 
travail. The parish of Tarbolton became the stage of 
a play that had all the makings of a farce and all the 
elements of a tragedy. There were endless complica- 
tions and daily developments, all deepening the dramatic 
intensity without disturbing the unity. We watch with 
breathless interest, dumbly wondering what the end will 
be. It is tragedy, comedy, melodrama, and burlesque 
all in one. 

Driven almost to madness by the faithlessness of 
Jean Armour, he rends himself in a whirlwind of passion, 
and seeks sympathy and solace in the love of Mary 
Campbell. What a situation for a novelist ! This is 
just how the story-teller would have made his jilted 
hero act ; sent him with bleeding heart to seek consola- 
tion in a new love. For novelists make a study of the 
vagaries of love, and know that hearts are caught in 
the rebound. 

Most of the biographers of Burns are agreed that 
this Highland lassie was the object of by far the deepest 
passion he ever knew. They may be right. Death 
stepped in before disillusion, and she was never other 
than the adored Mary of that rapturous meeting when 
the white hawthorn-blossom no purer was than their 
love. Thus was his love for Mary Campbell ever a 
holy and spiritual devotion. Auguste Angellier says : 
'This was the purest, the most lasting, and by far the 
noblest of his loves. Above all the others, many of 
which were more passionate, this one stands out with 
the chasteness of a lily. There is a complete contrast 
between his love for Jean and his love for Mary. In 



68 FAMOUS SCOTS 

the one case all the epithets are material ; here they 
are all moral. The praises are borrowed, not from the 
graces of the body, but from the features of the soul. 
The words which occur again and again are those of 
honour, of purity, of goodness. The idea of seeing her 
again some day was never absent from his mind. Every 
time he thought of eternity, of a future life, of reunions 
in some unknown state, it was to her that his heart 
went out. The love of that second Sunday of May was 
ever present. It was the love which led Burns to the 
most elevated sphere to which he ever attained ; it was 
the inspiration of his most spiritual efforts. This sweet, 
blue-eyed Highland lassie was his Beatrice, and waved 
to him from the gates of heaven.' 

We know little about Mary Campbell from the poet 
himself; and though much has been ferreted out about 
her by a host of snappers-up of unconsidered trifles, 
this episode in his life is still involved in mystery. It 
is pleasant to reflect that his reticence here has kept at 
least one love passage in his life sacred and holy. Is 
not mystery half the charm and beauty of love ? Yet, 
in spite of his silence, or probably because of it, details 
have been raked up from time to time, some grey 
and colourless fossil-remains of what was once fresh 
and living fact. From Burns himself we know that the 
lovers took a tender farewell in a sequestered spot by 
the banks of the Ayr, and parted never to meet again. 
All the romance and tragedy are there, and what need 
we more? We are not even certain as to either the 
place or the date of her death. Mrs. Begg, the poet's 
sister, knew little or nothing about Mary Campbell. 
She remembered, however, a letter being handed in to 



ROBERT BURNS 69 

him after the work of the season was over. ' He went 
to the window to open and read it, and she was struck 
by the look of agony which was the consequence. He 
went out without uttering a word.' What he felt he 
expressed afterwards in song — song that has become 
the language of bereaved and broken hearts for all 
time. The widowed lover knows 'the dear departed 
shade,' but he may not have heard of Mary Campbell. 

It was in May that Burns and Highland Mary had 
parted ; in June he wrote to a friend about ungrateful 
Armour, confessing that he still loved her to distraction, 
though he would not tell her so. But all his letters 
about this time are wild and rebellious. He raves in 
a tempest of passion, and cools himself again, perhaps 
in the composition of a song or poem. Just about the 
time this letter was written, his poems were already in 
the press. His proposal for publishing had met with 
so hearty a reception, that success financially was to a 
certain extent assured, and the printing had been put 
into the hands of John Wilson, Kilmarnock. Even yet 
his pen was busy. He wrote often in a gay and lively 
style, almost, it would seem, in a struggle to keep 
himself from sinking into melancholy, 'singing to keep 
his courage up.' His gaiety was 'the madness of an 
intoxicated criminal under the hands of the executioner.' 
A Bard^s Epitaph, however, among the many pieces of 
this season, is earnest and serious enough to disarm 
hostile criticism ; and his loose and flippant productions 
are read leniently in the light of this pathetic confession. 
It is a self-revelation truly, but it is honest, straight- 
forward, and manly. There is nothing plaintive or 
mawkish about it. 



70 FAMOUS SCOTS 

We next find Burns flying from home to escape legal 
measures that Jean Armour's father was instituting against 
him. He was in hiding at Kilmarnock to be out of the 
way of legal diligence, and it was in such circumstances 
that he saw his poems through the press. Surely never 
before in the history of literature had book burst from 
such a medley of misfortunes into so sudden and certain 
fame. Born in tumult, it vindicated its volcanic birth, 
and took the hearts of men by storm. Burns says little 
about those months of labour and bitterness. We know 
that he had then nearly as high an idea of himself and 
his works as he had in later life ; he had watched every 
means of information as to how much ground he occupied 
as a man and a poet, and was sure his poems would meet 
with some applause. He had subscriptions for about 
three hundred and fifty, and he got six hundred copies 
printed, pocketing, after all expenses were paid, nearly 
twenty pounds. With nine guineas of this sum he 
bespoke a passage in the first ship that was to sail for 
the West Indies. •! had for some time,' he says, 'been 
skulking from covert to covert under all the terrors of a 
jail, as some ill-advised, ungrateful people had uncoupled 
the merciless, legal pack at my heels. I had taken the 
last farewell of my friends ; my chest was on the road to 
Greenock ; I had composed the song The Gloomy Night 
is Gatherijig Fast, which was to be the last effort of my 
muse in Caledonia, when a letter from Dr. Blacklock to 
a friend of mine overthrew all my schemes, by rousing 
my poetic ambition. The doctor belonged to a class of 
critics, for whose applause I had not even dared to hope. 
His idea that I would meet with every encouragement 
for a second edition fired me so much, that away I 



ROBERT BURNS 71 

posted to Edinburgh, without a single acquaintance in 
town, or a single letter of recommendation in my pocket.' 

It was towards the end of July that the poems were 
published, and they met with a success that must have 
been gratifying to those friends who had stood by the 
poet in his hour of adversity, and done what they could 
to ensure subscriptions. In spite of the fact that Burns 
certainly looked upon himself as possessed of some 
poetic abilities, the reception the little volume met with, 
and the impression it at once made, must have exceeded 
his wildest anticipations. Even yet, however, he did not 
relinquish the idea of going to America. On the other 
hand, as we have seen, the first use he made of the 
money which publication had brought him, was to 
secure a berth in a vessel bound for Jamaica. But he 
was still compelled by the dramatic uncertainty of cir- 
cumstance. The day of sailing was postponed, else had 
he certainly left his native land. It was only after Jean 
Armour had become the mother of twin children that 
there was any hint of diffidence about sailing. In a 
letter to Robert Aitken, written in October, he says : 
' All these reasons urge me to go abroad, and to all these 
reasons I have one answer — the feelings of a father. 
That in the present mood I am in overbalances every- 
thing that can be laid in the scale against it.' 

His friends, too, after the success of his poems, were 
beginning to be doubtful about the wisdom of his going 
abroad, and were doing what they could to secure for 
him a place in the Excise. For his fame had gone 
beyond the bounds of his native county, and others than 
people in his own station had recognised his genius. 
Mrs. Dunlop of Dunlop was one of the first to seek the 



72 FAMOUS SCOTS 

poet's acquaintance, and she became an almost lifelong 
friend j through his poems he renewed acquaintance 
with Mrs. Stewart of Stair. He was ' roosed ' by Craigen- 
Gillan ; Dugald Stewart, the celebrated metaphysician, 
and one of the best-known names in the learned and 
literary circles of Edinburgh, who happened to be 
spending his vacation at Catrine, not very far from 
Mossgiel, invited the poet to dine with him, and on that 
occasion he * dinnered wi' a laird ' — Lord Daer. Then 
came the appreciative letter from Dr. Blacklock to the 
Rev. George Lawrie of Loudon, already mentioned. 
Even this letter might not have proved strong enough to 
detain him in Scotland, had it not been that he was 
disappointed of a second edition of his poems in Kil- 
marnock. Other encouragement came from Edinburgh 
in a very favourable criticism of his poems in the Edin- 
btirgh Magazine. This, taken along with Dr. Blacklock's 
suggestion about ' a second edition more numerous than 
the former,' led the poet to believe that his work would 
be taken up by any of the Edinburgh publishers. The 
feelings of a father also urged him to remain in Scotland ; 
and at length — probably in November — the thought of 
exile was abandoned. It was with very different feelings, 
we may be sure, that he contemplated setting out from 
Mossgiel to sojourn for a season in Edinburgh — a name 
that had ever been associated in his mind with the best 
traditions of learning and literature in Scotland. 



CHAPTER V 

THE EDINBURGH EDITION 

Edinburgh towards the close of last century was a 
very different place from Edinburgh of the present day. 
It was then to a certain extent the hub of Scottish 
society ; the centre of learning and literature ; the winter 
rendezvous of not a few of the nobility and gentry of 
Scotland. For in those days it had its society and its 
season; county families had not altogether abandoned 
the custom of keeping their houses in town. All roads 
did not then lead to London as they do now, when Edin- 
burgh is a capital in little more than name, and its 
prestige has become a tradition. A century ago Edin- 
burgh had all the glamour and fascination of the capital 
of a no mean country ; to-day it is but the historical 
capital invested with the glamour and fascination of a 
departed glory. The very names of those whom Burns 
met on his first visit to Edinburgh are part of the history 
of the nation. In the University there were at that time, 
representative of the learning of the age, Dugald Stewart, 
Dr. Blair, and Dr. Robertson. David Hume was but 
recently dead, and the lustre of his name remained. 
His great friend, Adam Smith, author of The Wealth of 
Nations, was still living ; while Henry Mackenzie, The 
Man of Feeling, the most popular writer of his day, was 

73 



74 FAMOUS SCOTS 

editing The Loiwger ; and Dr. Blacklock, the blind poet, 
was also a name of authority in the world of letters. 
Nor was the Bar, whose magnates have ever figured in 
the front rank of Edinburgh society, eclipsed by the 
literary luminaries of the University. Lord Monboddo 
has left a name, which his countrymen are not hkely to 
forget. He was an accomplished, though eccentric 
character, whose classical bent was in the direction of 
Epicurean parties. His great desire was to revive the 
traditions of the elegant suppers of classical times. Not 
only were music and painting employed to this end, but 
the tables were wreathed with flowers, the odour of 
incense pervaded the room; the wines were of the 
choicest, served from decanters of Grecian design. But, 
perhaps, the chief attraction to Burns in the midst of 
all this super - refinement was the presence of * the 
heavenly Miss Burnet,' daughter of Lord Monboddo. 
' There has not been anything nearly like her,' he wrote 
to his friend Chalmers, 'in all the combinations of 
beauty and grace and goodness the great Creator has 
formed since Milton's Eve in the first day of her 
existence.' The Hon. Henry Erskine was another well- 
known name, not only in legal circles, but as well in 
fashionable society. His genial and sunny nature made 
him so great a favourite in his profession, that having 
been elected Dean of the Faculty of Advocates in 1786, 
he was unanimously re-elected every year till 1796, when 
he was victorious over Dundas of Arniston, who had 
been brought forward in opposition to him. The leader 
of fashion was the celebrated Duchess of Gordon, who 
was never absent from a public place, and ' the later the 
hour so much the better.' Her amusements — her life, 



ROBERT BURNS 75 

we might say — were dancing, cards, and company. With 
such a leader, the season to the very select and elegant 
society of Edinburgh was certain to be a time of brilliance 
and gaiety ; while its very exclusiveness, and the fact 
that it affected or reflected the literary life of the Uni- 
versity and the Bar, would make it all the more ready to 
lionise a man like Burns when the opportunity came. 

The members of the middle class caught their tone 
from the upper ranks, and took their nightly sederunts 
and morning headaches as privileges they dared aristo- 
cratic exclusiveness to deny them. Douce citizens, mer- 
chants, respectable tradesmen, well-to-do lawyers, for- 
gathered when the labours of the day were done to spend 
a few hours in some snug back-parlour, where mine host 
granted them the privileges and privacy of a club. Such 
social beings as these, met to discuss punch, law, and 
literature, were no less likely than their aristocratic 
neighbours to receive Burns with open arms, and once 
he was in their midst to prolong their sittings in his 
honour. Nor was Burns, if he found them honest and 
hearty fellows, the man to say them nay. He was 
eminently a social and sociable being, and in company 
such as theirs he could unbend himself as he might not 
do in the houses of punctilious society. The etiquette 
of that howff of the Crochallan Fencibles in the Anchor 
Close or of Johnnie Dowie's tavern in Libberton's 
Wynd was not the etiquette of drawing-rooms; and the 
poet was free to enliven the hours with a rattling fire of 
witty remarks on men and things as he had been wont 
to do on the bog at Lochlea, with only a few noteless 
peasants for audience. 

Burns entered Edinburgh on November 28, 1786. 



76 FAMOUS SCOTS 

He had spent the night after leaving Mossgiel at the 
farm of Covington Mains, where the kind-hearted host, 
Mr. Prentice, had all the farmers of the parish gathered 
to meet him. This is of interest as showing the popu- 
larity Burns's poems had already won; while the eagerness 
of those farmers to see and know the man after they had 
read his poems proves most strikingly how straight the 
poet had gone to the hearts of his readers. They had 
recognised the voice of a human being, and heard it 
gladly. This gathering was convincing testimony, if such 
were needed, of the triUhfulness and sincerity of his 
writings. No doubt Burns, with his great force of under- 
standing, appreciated the welcome of those brother- 
farmers, and valued it above the adulation he afterwards 
received in Edinburgh. The Kilmarnock Edition was 
but a few months old, yet here was a gathering of hard- 
working men, who had read his poems, we may be sure, 
from cover to cover, and now they were eager to thank 
him who had sung the joys and sorrows of their worka- 
day lives. Of course there was a great banquet, and 
night wore into morning before the company dispersed. 
They had seen the poet face to face, and the man was 
greater than his poems. 

Next morning he resumed his journey, breakfasting at 
Carnwath, and reaching Edinburgh in the evening. He 
had come, as he tells us, without a letter of introduction 
in his pocket, and he took up his abode with John 
Richmond in Baxter's Close, off the Lawnmarket. He 
had known Richmond when he was a clerk with Gavin 
Hamilton, and had kept up a correspondence with him 
ever since he had left Mauchline. The lodging was a 
humble enough one, the rent being only three shillings a 



ROBERT BURNS 



77 



week ; but here Burns lodged all the time he was in 
Edinburgh, and it was hither he returned from visiting 
the houses of the rich and great, to share a bed with his 
friend and companion of many a merry meeting at 
Mauchline. 

It would be vain to attempt to describe Burns's feelings 
during those first few days in Edinburgh. He had never 
before been in a larger town than Kilmarnock or Ayr ; 
and now he walked the streets of Scotland's capital, to 
him full of history and instinct with the associations of 
centuries. This was really the heart of Scotland, the 
home of heroes who fought and fell for their country, 
' the abode of kings of other years.' His sentimental 
attachment to Jacobitism became more pronounced as 
he looked on Holyrood. For Burns, a representative of 
the strength and weakness of his countrymen, was no less 
representative of Scotland's sons in his chivalrous pity for 
the fate of Queen Mary and his romantic loyalty to the 
gallant Prince Charlie. His poetical espousal of the cause 
of the luckless Stuarts was purely a matter of sentiment, a 
kind of pious pity that had little to do with reason ; and 
in this he was typical of his countrymen even of the 
present day, who are loyal to the house of Stuart in 
song, and in life are loyal subjects of their Queen. 

We are told, and we can well believe that for the first 
few days of his stay he wandered about, looking down 
from Arthur's Seat, gazing at the Castle, or contemplating 
the windows of the booksellers' shops. We know that he 
made a special pilgrimage to the grave of Fergusson, and 
that in a letter, dated February 6, 1787, he applied to 
the honourable bailies of Canongate, Edinburgh, for 
permission 'to lay a simple stone over his revered ashes'; 



78 FAMOUS SCOTS 

which petition was duly considered and graciously 
granted. The stone was afterwards erected, with the 
simple inscription, ' Here lies Robert Fergusson, Poet. 
Born September 5th, 1751 j died i6th October, 1774. 

No sculptured marble here, nor pompous lay, 
"No storied urn nor animated bust" ; 

This simple stone directs pale Scotia's way 
To pour her sorrow o'er her poet's dust,' 

On the reverse side is recorded the fact that the stone 
was erected by Robert Burns, and that the ground was 
to remain for ever sacred to the memory of Robert 
Fergusson, 

It is related, too, that he visited Ramsay's house, and 
that he bared his head when he entered. Burns over 
and over again, both in prose and verse, turned to these 
two' names with a kind of fetich worship, that it is diffi- 
cult to understand. He must have known that, as a poet, 
he was immeasurably superior to both. It may have 
been that their writings first opened his eyes to the 
possibilities of the Scots tongue in lyrical and descriptive 
poetry ; and there was something also which appealed to 
him in the wretched life of Fergusson, 

' O thou, my elder brother in misfortune, 
By far my elder brother in the Muses.' 

His elder brother indeed by some six years ! But there 
is more of reverence than sound judgment in his estimate 
of either Ramsay or Fergusson, 

Burns, however, had come to Edinburgh with a fixed 
purpose in view, and it would not do to waste his time 
mooning about the streets. On December 7 we find 
him writing to Gavin Hamilton, half seriously, half 



ROBERT BURNS 79 

jokingly : ' I am in a fair way of becoming as eminent as 
Thomas k Kempis or John Bunyan, and you may ex- 
pect henceforth to see my birthday inserted among the 
wonderful events in the Poor Robins' and Aberdeen 
Almanacs along with the Black Monday and the Battle 
of Bothwell Bridge. My Lord Glencairn and the Dean 
of Faculty, Mr. H. Erskine, have taken me under their 
wing, and by all probability I shall soon be the tenth 
worthy and the eighth wise man of the world. Through 
my lord's influence it is inserted in the records of the 
Caledonian Hunt that they universally one and all sub- 
scribe for the second edition.' 

This letter shows that Burns had already been taken 
up, as the phrase goes, by the elite of Edinburgh ; and 
it shows also and quite as clearly in the tone of quiet 
banter, that he was little likely to lose his head by the 
notice taken of him. To the Earl of Glencairn, men- 
tioned in it, he had been introduced probably by Mr. 
Ualrymple of Orangefield, whom he knew both as a 
brother - mason and a brother - poet. The Earl had 
already seen the Kilmarnock Edition of the poems, and 
now he not only introduced Burns to William Creech, 
the leading publisher in Edinburgh, but he got the 
members of the Caledonian Hunt to become subscribers 
for a second edition of the poems. To Erskine he had 
been introduced at a meeting of the Canongate Kil- 
winning Lodge of Freemasons; and assuredly there 
was no man living more likely to exert himself in the 
interests of a genius like Burns. 

Two days after this letter to Gavin Hamilton there 
appeared in The Lounger Mackenzie's appreciative 
notice of the Kilmarnock Edition. This notice has 



8o FAMOUS SCOTS 

become historical, and at the time of its appearance 
it must have been pecuharly gratifying to Burns. He 
had remarked before, in reference to the letter from 
Dr. Blacklock, that the doctor belonged to a class of 
critics for whose applause he had not even dared to 
hope. Now his work was criticised most favourably by 
the one who was regarded as the highest authority on 
literature in Scotland. If a writer was praised in The 
Lounger, his fame was assured. He went into the world 
with the hall-mark of Henry Mackenzie ; and what more 
was needed ? The oracle had spoken, and his decision 
was final. His pronouncement would be echoed and 
re-echoed from end to end of the country. And this 
great critic claimed no special indulgence for Burns on 
the plea of his mean birth or poor education. He saw 
in this heaven-taught ploughman a genius of no ordinary 
rank, a man who possessed the spirit as well as the fancy 
of a great poet. He was a poet, and it mattered not 
whether he had been born a peasant or a peer. * His 
poetry, considered abstractedly and without the apologies 
arising from his situation, seems to me fully entitled to 
command our feelings and obtain our applause. . . . 
The power of genius is not less admirable in tracing the 
manners, than in painting the passions or in drawing the 
scenery of nature. That intuitive glance with which a 
writer like Shakspeare discerns the character of men, 
with which he catches the many changing hues of life, 
forms a sort of problem in the science of mind, of which 
it is easier to see the truth than assign the cause.' 

But Mackenzie did more than praise. He pointed 
out the fact that the author had had a terrible struggle 
with poverty all the days of his life, and made an appeal 



ROBERT BURNS 8i 

to his country ' to stretch out her hand and retain the 
native poet whose wood-notes wild possessed so much 
excellence.' There seems little doubt that the con- 
cluding words of this notice led Burns for the first time 
to hope and believe that, through some influential patron, 
he might be placed in a position to face the future 
without a fear, and to cultivate poetry at his leisure. 
There is no mistaking the meaning of Mackenzie's 
words, and he had evidently used them with the con- 
viction that something would be done for Burns. 
Unfortunately, he was mistaken ; the poet, at first 
misled, was slowly disillusioned and somewhat em- 
bittered, ' To repair the wrongs of suffering or neglected 
merit; to call forth genius from the obscurity where it 
had pined indignant, and place it where it may profit or 
delight the world — these are exertions which give to 
wealth an enviable superiority, to greatness and to 
patronage a laudable pride.' 

To Burns, at the time, such a criticism as this must 
have been all the more pleasing, inasmuch as it was the 
verdict of a man whose best-known work had been one 
of the poet's favourite books. We can easily imagine 
that, under the patronage of Lord Glencairn and Henry 
Erskine, and after Mackenzie's generous recognition of 
his genius, the doors of the best houses in Edinburgh 
would be open to him. His letter to John Ballantine, 
Ayr, written a few days after this criticism appeared, 
shows in what circles the poet was then moving. *I 
have been introduced to a good many of the noblesse^ 
but my avowed patrons and patronesses are, the Duchess 
of Gordon, the Countess of Glencairn with my Lord 
and Lady Betty, the Dean of Faculty, Sir John White- 
6 



82 FAMOUS SCOTS 

foord. I have likewise warm friends among the literati-, 
Professors Stewart, Blair, and Mr. Mackenzie, The Man 
of Feeling. ... I am nearly agreed with Creech to print 
my book, and I suppose I will begin on Monday. . . . 
Dugald Stewart and some of my learned friends put me 
in a periodical called The Lounger, a copy of which I 
here enclose you. I was. Sir, when I was first honoured 
with your notice, too obscure ; now I tremble lest I 
should be ruined by being dragged too suddenly into 
the glare of learned and polite observation.' 

Burns was now indeed the lion of Edinburgh. It 
must have been a great change for a man to have come 
straight from the stilts of the plough to be dined and 
toasted by such men as Lord Glencairn, Lord Mon- 
boddo, and the Hon. Henry Erskine; to be feted and 
flattered by the Duchess of Gordon, the Countess of 
Glencairn, and Lady Betty Cunningham ; to count 
amongst his friends Mr. Mackenzie and Professors 
Stewart and Blair. It would have been little wonder if 
his head had been turned by the patronage of the 
nobility, the deference and attention of the literary and 
learned coteries of Edinburgh. But Burns was too 
sensible to be carried away by the adulation of a season. 
A man of his keenness of penetration and clearness of 
insight would appreciate the praise of the world at its 
proper value. He bore himself with becoming dignity, 
taking his place in refined society as one who had a 
right there, without showing himself either conceitedly 
aggressive or meanly servile. He took his part in 
conversation, but no more than his part, and expressed 
himself with freedom and decision. His conversation, 
in fact, astonished the literati even more than his poems 



ROBERT BURNS 83 

had done. Perhaps they had expected some uncouth 
individual who would stammer crop - and - weather 
commonplaces in a rugged vernacular, or, worse still, 
in ungrammatical English ; but here was one who held 
his own with them in speculative discussion, speaking 
not only with the eloquence of a poet, but with the 
readiness, clearness, and fluency of a man of letters. 
His pure English diction astonished them, but his 
acuteness of reasoning, his intuitive knowledge of men 
and the world, was altogether beyond their comprehen- 
sion. All they had got by years of laborious study 
this man appeared to have as a natural gift. In repartee, 
even, he could more than hold his own with them, and 
in the presence of ladies could turn a compliment with 
the best. 'It needs no effort of imagination,' says 
Lockhart, ' to conceive what the sensations of an isolated 
set of scholars (almost all either clergymen or professors) 
must have been in the presence of this big-boned, black- 
browed, brawny stranger, who, having forced his way 
among them from the plough-tail at a single stride, 
manifested in the whole strain of his bearing and con- 
versation a most thorough conviction that in the society 
of the most eminent men of his nation he was exactly 
where he was entitled to be.' It was a new world to 
Burns, yet he walked about as if he Vvere of old familiar 
with its ways; he conducted himself in society like 
one to the manner born. 

All who have left written evidence of Burns's visit to 
Edinburgh are agreed that he conducted himself with 
manliness and dignity, and all have left record of the 
powerful impression his conversation made on them. 
His poems were wonderful; himself was greater than 



84 FAMOUS SCOTS 

his poems, a giant in intellect, A ploughman who 
actually dared to have formed a distinct conception of 
the doctrine of association was a miracle before which 
schools and scholars were dumb. ' Nothing, perhaps,' 
Dugald Stewart wrote, * was more remarkable among his 
various attainments than the fluency, precision, and 
originality of his language when he spoke in company ; 
more particularly as he aimed at purity in his turn of 
expression, and avoided more successfully than most 
Scotchmen the peculiarities of Scottish phraseology.' 

And Professor Stewart goes further than this when he 
speaks of the soundness and sanity of Burns's nature. 
* The attentions he received during his stay in town from 
all ranks and descriptions of persons, were such as would 
have turned any head but his own. He retained the 
same simplicity of manner and appearance which had 
struck me so forcibly when I first saw him in the country ; 
nor did he seem to feel any additional self-importance 
from the number and rank of his new acquaintance. 
His dress was perfectly suited to his station, plain and 
unpretentious, with a sufficient attention to neatness.' 
Principal Robertson has left it on record, that he had 
scarcely ever met with any man whose conversation 
displayed greater vigour than that of Burns. Walter 
Scott, a youth of some sixteen years at the time, met 
Burns at the house of Dr. Adam Ferguson, and was 
particularly struck with his poetic eye, 'which literally 
glowed when he spoke with feeling or interest,' and with 
his forcible conversation. * Among the men who were 
the most learned of their time and country, he expressed 
himself with perfect firmness, but without the least in- 
trusive forwardness ; and when he differed in opinion, he 



ROBERT BURNS 85 

did not hesitate to express it firmly, and at the same 
time with modesty. ... I never saw a man in company 
more perfectly free from either the reality or the aflfecta- 
tion of embarrassment.' To these may be added the 
testimony of Dr. Walker, who gives, perhaps, the most 
complete and convincing picture of the man at this 
time. He insists on the same outstanding characteristics 
in Burns, his innate dignity, his unaffected demeanour 
in company, and brilliancy in conversation. In no part 
of his manner, we read, was there the slightest degree of 
affectation, and no one could have guessed from his 
behaviour or conversation, that he had been for some 
months the favourite of all the fashionable circles of a 
metropolis. ' In conversation he was powerful. His 
conceptions and expression were of corresponding vigour, 
and on all subjects were as remote as possible from 
commonplace.' 

But whilst ladies of rank and fashion were deluging 
this Ayrshire ploughman with invitations, and vying 
one with another in their patronage and worship, the 
mind of the poet was no less busy registering im- 
pressions of every new experience. If the learned men 
of Edinburgh set themselves to study the character of a 
genius who upset all their cherished theories of birth 
and education, and to chronicle his sayings and doings, 
Burns at the same time was studying tnem, gauging their 
powers intuitively, telling their limitations at a glance. 
For he must measure every man he met, and himself 
with him. His standard was always the same; every 
brain was weighed against his own ; but with Burns this 
was never more than a comparison of capacities. He 
took his stand, not by what work he had done, but by 



86 FAMOUS SCOTS 

what he felt he was capable of doing. And that is not, 
and cannot be, the way of the world. In all his letters 
at this time we see him studying himself in the circles 
of fashion and learning. He could look on Robert 
Burns, as he were another person, brought from the 
plough and set down in a world of wealth and refine- 
ment, of learning and wit and beauty. He saw the 
dangers that beset him, and the temptations to which he 
was exposed ; he recognised that something more than 
his poetic abilities was needed to explain his sudden 
popularity. He was the vogue, the favourite of a season ; 
but public favour was capricious, and next year the doors 
of the great might be closed against him ; while patrician 
dames who had schemed for his smiles might glance at 
him with indifferent eyes as at a dismissed servant once 
high in favour. His letter to Mrs. Dunlop, dated 
January 15, may be taken as a just, deliberate, and clear 
expression of his views of himself and society at this time. 
The letter is so quietly dignified that we may quote at 
some length. ' You are afraid I shall grow intoxicated 
with my prosperity as a poet. Alas ! madam, I know 
myself and the world too well. I do not mean any airs 
of affected modesty ; I am willing to believe that my 
abilities deserve some notice, but in a most enlightened, 
informed age and nation, where poetry is and has been 
the study of men of the first natural genius, aided with 
all the powers of polite learning, polite books, and polite 
company — to be dragged forth to the full glare of learned 
and polite observation, with all my imperfections of 
awkward rusticity and crude and unpolished ideas on 
my head — I assure you, madam, I do not dissemble 
when I tell you I tremble for the consequences. The 



ROBERT BURNS 87 

novelty of a poet in my obscure situation, without any 
of those advantages that are reckoned necessary for that 
character, at least at this time of day, has raised a partial 
tide of public notice which has borne me to a height 
where I am absolutely, feelingly certain my abilities are 
inadequate to support me ; and too surely do I see that 
time when the same tide will leave me and recede, per- 
haps as far below the mark of truth, I do not say this 
in the ridiculous affectation of self-abasement and 
modesty. I have studied myself, and know what ground 
I occupy ; and however a friend or the world may differ 
from me in that particular, I stand for my own opinion 
in silent resolve, with all the tenaciousness of property. 
I mention this to you once for all to disburden my mind, 
and I do not wish to hear or say more about it. But — 

"When proud fortune's ebbing tide recedes," 

you will bear me witness that when my bubble of fame 
was at the highest, I stood unintoxicated with the in- 
ebriating cup in my hand, looking forward with rueful 
resolve to the hastening time when the blow of calamity 
should dash it to the ground with all the eagerness of 
vengeful triumph.' 

In a letter to Dr. Moore he harps on the same string, 
for he sees clearly enough that though his abilities as a 
poet are worthy of recognition, it is ihe novelty of his 
position and the strangeness of the life he has pictured 
in his poems that have brought him into polite notice. 
The field of his poetry, rather than the poetry itself, 
is the wonder in the eyes of stately society. To the 
Rev. Mr. Lawrie of Loudon he writes in a similar strain, 
and speaks even more emphatically. From all his letters, 



88 FAMOUS SCOTS 

indeed, at this time we gather that he saw that novelty 
had much to do with his present ^clat ; that the tide 
of popularity would recede, and leave him at his leisure 
to descend to his former situation ; and, above all, that 
he was prepared for this, come when it would. 

All this time he had been busy correcting the proofs 
of his poems ; and now that he was already assured the 
edition would be a success, he began to think seriously 
of the future and of settling down again as farmer. 
The appellation of Scottish Bard, he confessed to Mrs. 
Dunlop, was his highest pride ; to continue to deserve 
it, his most exalted ambition. He had no dearer aim 
than to be able to make * leisurely pilgrimages through 
Caledonia, to sit on the fields of her battles, to wander 
on the romantic banks of her rivers, and to muse by the 
stately towers or venerable ruins, once the honoured 
abodes of her heroes.' But that was a Utopian dream; 
he had dallied long enough with life, and now it was 
time he should be in earnest. ' I have a fond, an aged 
mother to care for ; and some other bosom ties perhaps 
equally tender.' 

Perhaps, had Burns received before he left Edinburgh 
the ;^5oo which Creech ultimately paid him for the 
Edinburgh Edition, he might have gone straight to a 
farm in the south country, and taken up what he con- 
sidered the serious business of life. He himself, about 
this time, estimated that he would clear nearly ;^3oo by 
authorship, and with that sum he intended to return to 
farming. Mr. Miller of Dalswinton had expressed a 
wish to have Burns as tenant of one of his farms, and 
the poet had been already approached on the subject. 
We also gather from almost every letter written just 



ROBERT BURNS 89 

before the publication of his poems, that he contemplated 
an immediate return ' to his shades.' However, when 
the Edinburgh Edition came out, April 21, 1787, the 
poet found that it would be a considerable time before 
the whole profits accruing from publication could be 
paid over to him. Indeed, there was certainly an un- 
necessary delay on Creech's part in making a settlement. 
The first instalment of profits was not sufficient for 
leasing and stocking a farm ; and during the months that 
elapsed before the whole profits were in his hands, Burns 
made several tours through the Borders and Highlands 
of Scotland. This was certainly one of his dearest aims ; 
but these tours were undertaken somewhat under com- 
pulsion, and we doubt not he would much more gladly 
have gone straight back to farm -life, and kept these 
leisurely pilgrimages to a more convenient season. One 
is not in a mood for dreaming on battlefields, or wander- 
ing in a reverie by romantic rivers, when the future is 
unsettled and life is for the time being without an aim. 
There is something of mystery and melancholy hanging 
about these peregrinations, and the cause, it seems to 
us, is not far to seek. These months are months of 
waiting and wearying ; he is unsettled, oftentimes moody 
and despondent ; his bursts of gaiety appear forced, and 
his muse is well-nigh barren. In the circumstances, no 
doubt it was the best thing he could do, to gratify his 
long-cherished desire of seeing these places in his native 
country, whose names were enshrined in song or story. 
But how much more pleasant — and more profitable both 
to the poet himself and the country he loved — had these 
journeys been made under more favourable conditions ! 
The past also as much as the future weighed on the 



go FAMOUS SCOTS 

poet's mind His days had been so fully occupied in 
Edinburgh that he had little leisure to think on some 
dark and dramatic episodes of Mauchline and Kilmar- 
nock ; but now in his wanderings he has time not only 
to think but to brood ; and we may be sure the face of 
Bonnie Jean haunted him in dreams, and that his heart 
heard again and again the plaintive voices of little 
children. In several of his letters now we detect a 
tone of bitterness, in which we suspect there is more 
of remorse than of resentment with the world. He 
certainly was disappointed that Creech could not pay 
him in full, but he must have been gratified with the 
reception his poems had got. The list of subscribers 
ran to thirty-eight pages, and was representative of 
every class in Scotland. In the words of Cunningham : 
'All that coterie influence and individual exertion — 
all that the noblest and humblest could do, was done to 
aid in giving it a kind reception. Creech, too, had 
announced it through the booksellers of the land, and 
it was soon diffused over the country, over the colonies, 
and wherever the language was spoken. The literary 
men of the South seemed even to fly to a height beyond 
those of the North. Some hesitated not to call him the 
Northern Shakspeare.' 

This surely was a great achievement for one who, 
a few months previously, had been skulking from covert 
to covert to escape the terrors of a jail. He had 
hardly dared to hope for the commendation of the 
Edinburgh critics, yet he had been received by the best 
society of the capital; his genius had been recognised 
by the highest literary authorities of Scotland; and 
now the second edition of his poems was published 



ROBERT BURNS 91 

under auspices that gave it the character of a national 
book. 

If the poems this volume contained established fully 
and finally the reputation of the poet, the subscription 
list was a no less substantial proof of a generous and 
enthusiastic appreciation of his genius on the part of his 
countrymen. And that Burns must have recognised. 
A man of his sound common sense could not have 
expected more. 



CHAPTER VI 



BURNS S TOURS 



The Edinburgh Edition having now been published, 
there was no reason for the poet to prolong his stay in 
the city. It was only after being disappointed of a 
second Kilmarnock Edition of his poems that he had 
come to try his fortunes in the capital ; and now that his 
hopes of a fuller edition and a wider field had been 
realised, the purpose of his visit was accomplished, and 
there was no need to fritter his time away in idleness. 

In a letter to Lord Buchan, Burns had doubted the 
prudence of a penniless poet faring forth to see the 
sights of his native land. But circumstances have 
changed. With the assured prospect of the financial 
success of his second venture, he felt himself in a 
position to gratify the dearest wish of his heart and 
to fire his muse at Scottish story and Scottish scenes. 
Moreover, as has been said, it would be some time 
before Creech could come to a final settlement of 
accounts with the poet, and he may have deemed 
that the interval would be profitably spent in travel. 
His travelling companion on his first tour was a Mr. 
Robert Ainslie, a young gentleman of good education 
and some natural ability, with whom he left Edinburgh 
on the 5th May, a fortnight after the publication of his 



92 



ROBERT BURNS 93 

poems. We are told that the poet, just before he 
mounted his horse, received a letter from Dr. Blair, 
which, having partly read, he crumpled up and angrily 
thrust into his pocket. A perusal of the letter will 
explain, if it does not go far to justify, the poet's irrita- 
tion. It is a sleek, superior production, with the tone of 
a temperance tract, and the stilted diction of a dominie. 
The doctor is in it one of those well-meaning, meddle- 
some men, lavish of academic advice. Burns resented 
moral prescriptions at all times — more especially from 
one whose knowledge of men was severely scholastic; 
and we can well imagine that he quitted Edinburgh in 
no amiable mood. 

From Edinburgh the two journeyed by the Lammer- 
muirs to Berrywell, near Duns, where the Ainslie family 
lived. On the Sunday he attended church with the 
Ainslies, where the minister. Dr. Bowmaker, preached a 
sermon against obstinate sinners. ' I am found out,' 
the poet remarked, 'wherever I go.' From Duns they 
proceeded to Coldstream, where, having crossed the 
Tweed, Burns first set foot on English ground. Here 
it was that, with bared head, he knelt and prayed for a 
blessing on Scotland, reciting with the deepest devotion 
the two concluding verses of The Cotter's Saturday Night. 

The next place visited was Kelso, vvhere they admired 
the old abbey, and went to see Roxburgh Castle, thence 
to Jedburgh, where he met a Miss Hope and a Miss 
Lindsay, the latter of whom 'thawed his heart into 
melting pleasure after being so long frozen up in the 
Greenland Bay of indifference amid the noise and non- 
sense of Edinburgh.' When he left this romantic city 
his thoughts were not of the honour its citizens had done 



94 FAMOUS SCOTS 

him, but of Jed's crystal stream and sylvan banks, and, 
above all, of Miss Lindsay, who brings him to the verge 
of verse. Thereafter he visited Kelso, Melrose, and 
Selkirk, and after spending about three weeks seeing 
all that was to be seen in this beautiful country-side, 
he set off with a Mr. Ker and a Mr. Hood on a visit to 
England. In this visit he went as far as Newcastle, re- 
turning by way of Hexham and Carlisle. After spend- 
ing a day here he proceeded to Annan, and thence to 
Dumfries. Whilst in the Nithsdale district he took the 
opportunity of visiting Dalswinton and inspecting the 
unoccupied farms ; but he did not immediately close 
with Mr. Miller's generous offer of a four-nineteen years' 
lease on his own terms. From Nithsdale he turned 
again to his native Ayrshire, arriving at Mossgiel in the 
beginning of June, after an absence from home of six 
eventful months. 

We can hardly imagine what this home-coming would 
be like. The Burnses were typical Scots in their un- 
demonstrative ways ; but this was a great occasion, and 
tradition has it that his mother allowed her feeling so far 
to overcome her natural reticence that she met him at 
the threshold with the exclamation, ' O Robert ! ' He 
had left home almost unknown, and had returned with a 
name that was known and honoured from end to end of 
his native land. He had left in the direst poverty, and 
haunted with the terrors of a jail, now he came back 
with his fortune assured ; if not actually rich, at least 
with more money due to him than the family had ever 
dreamed of possessing. The mother's excess of feeling 
on such an occasion as this may be easily understood 
and excused. 



ROBERT BURNS 95 

Of this Border tour Burns kept a scrappy journal, but 
he was more concerned in jotting down the names and 
characteristics of those with whom he forgathered than 
of letting himself out in snatches of song. He makes 
shrewd remarks by the way on farms and farming, on 
the washing and shearing of sheep, but the only verse 
he attempted was his Epistle to Creech. He who had 
longed to sit and muse on ' those once hard-contested 
fields' did not go out of his way to look on Ancrum 
Moor or Philiphaugh, nor do we read of him musing 
pensive in Yarrow. 

However, we are not to regard these days as altogether 
barren. The poet was gathering impressions which 
would come forth in song at some future time. 
* Neither the fine scenery nor the lovely women,' 
Cunningham regrets, 'produced any serious effect on 
his muse.' This is a rash statement. Poets do not 
sow and reap at the same time — not even Burns. If 
his friends were disappointed at what they considered 
the sterility of his muse on this occasion, the fault did 
not lie with the poet, but with their absurd expectations. 
It may be as well to point out here that the greatest 
harm Edinburgh did to Burns was that it gathered round 
him a number of impatient and injudicious admirers 
who could not understand that poetry was not to be 
forced. The burst of poetry that practically filled the 
Kilmarnock Edition came after a seven years' growth of 
inspiration; but after his first visit to Edinburgh he 
was never allowed to rest. It was expected that he 
should write whenever a subject was suggested, or burst 
into verse at the first glimpse of a lovely landscape. 
Every friend was ready with advice as to how and what 



96 FAMOUS SCOTS 

he should write, and quite as ready, the poet un- 
fortunately knew, to criticise afterwards. The poetry 
of the Mossgiel period had come from him spontaneously. 
He had flung off impressions in verse fearlessly, without 
pausing to consider how his work would be appreciated 
by this one or denounced by that; and was true to 
himself Now he knew that every verse he wrote would 
be read by many eyes, studied by many minds; some 
would scent heresy, others would spot Jacobitism, or 
worse, freedom ; some would suspect his morality, 
others would deplore his Scots tongue ; all would criti- 
cise favourably or adversely his poetic expression. It 
has to be kept in mind, too, that Burns at this time 
was in no mood for writing poetry. His mind was 
not at ease ; and after his long spell of inspiration and 
the fatiguing distractions of Edinburgh, it was hardly to 
be wondered at that brain and body were alike in need 
of rest. The most natural rest would have been a 
return direct to the labours of the farm. That, how- 
ever, was denied him, and the period of his journeyings 
was little else than a season of unsettlement and 
suspense. 

Burns only stayed a few days at home, and then set 
off on a tour to the West Highlands, a tour of which 
we know little or nothing. Perhaps this was merely a 
pilgrimage to the grave of Highland Mary. We do 
not know, and need not curiously inquire. Burns, as 
has been already remarked, kept sacred his love for 
this generous-hearted maiden, hidden away in his own 
heart, and the whole story is a beautiful mystery. We 
do know that before he left he visited the Armours, 
and was disgusted with the changed attitude of the 



ROBERT BURNS 97 

family towards himself. ' If anything had been want- 
ing,' he wrote to Mr. James Smith, *to disgust me 
completely at Armour's family, their mean, servile com- 
pliance would have done it.' To his friend, William 
Nicol, he wrote in the same strain. * I never, my 
friend, thought mankind very capable of anything 
generous ; but the stateliness of the patricians in Edin- 
burgh, and the servility of my plebeian brethren (who 
perhaps formerly eyed me askance) since I returned 
home, have nearly put me out of conceit altogether with 
my species.' 

This shows Burns in no very enviable frame of mind ; 
but the cause is obvious. He is as yet unsettled in 
life, and now that he has met again his Bonnie Jean, 
and seen his children, he is more than ever dissatisfied 
with aimless roving. ' I have yet fixed on nothing with 
respect to the serious business of life. I am just as 
usual a rhyming, mason-making, raking, aimless, idle 
fellow. However, I shall somewhere have a farm soon. 
I was going to say a wife too, but that must never be 
my blessed lot.' 

To his own folks he was nothing but kindness, ready 
to share with them his uttermost farthing, and to have 
them share in the glory that was his; but he was at 
enmity with himself, and at war with the world. Like 
Hamlet, who felt keenly, but was incapable of action, he 
saw that ' the times were out of joint ' ; circumstances 
were too strong for him. Almost the only record we 
have of this tour is a vicious epigram on what he con- 
sidered the flunkeyism of Inveraray. Nor are we in the 
least astonished to hear that on the homeward route he 
spent a night in dancing and boisterous revel, ushering 
7 



98 FAMOUS SCOTS 

in the day with a kind of burlesque of pagan sun- 
worship. This was simply a reaction from his gloom 
and despondency ; he sought to forget himself in reckless 
conviviality. 

About the end of July we find him back again in 
Mauchline, and on the 25th May he set out on a 
Highland tour along with his friend William Nicol, one 
of the masters of the High School. Of this man Dr. 
Currie remarks that he rose by the strength of his 
talents, and fell by the strength of his passions. Burns 
was perfectly well aware of the passionate and quarrelsome 
nature of the man. He compared himself with such a 
companion to one travelling with a loaded blunderbuss 
at full-cock ; and in his epigrammatic way he said of him 
to Mr. Walker, ' His mind is like his body ; he has a 
confounded, strong, in-kneed sort of a soul.' The man, 
however, had some good qualities. He had a warm 
heart ; never forgot the friends of his early years, and 
he hated vehemently low jealousy and cunning. These 
were qualities that would appeal strongly to Burns, and 
on account of which much would be forgiven. Still we 
cannot think that the poet was happy in his companion ; 
nor was he yet happy in himself. Otherwise the High- 
land tour might have been more interesting, certainly 
much more profitable to the poet in its results, than it 
actually proved. 

In his diary of this tour, as in his diary of the Border 
tour, there is much more of shrewd remark on men 
and things than of poetical jottings. The fact is, poetry 
is not to be collected in jottings, nor is inspiration to 
be culled in catalogue cuttings ; and if many of his 
friends were again disappointed in the immediate 



ROBERT BURNS 99 

poetical results of this holiday, it only shows how 
little they understood the comings and goings of in- 
spiration. Those, however, who read his notes and 
reflections carefully and intelligently are bound to notice 
how much more than a mere verse-maker Burns was. 
This was the journal of a man of strong, sound sense 
and keen observation. It has also to be recognised that 
Burns was at his weakest when he attempted to describe 
scenery for mere scenery's sake. His gift did not lie 
that way. His landscapes, rich in colour and deftly 
drawn though they be, are always the mere backgrounds 
of his pictures. They are impressionistic sketches, the 
setting and the complement of something of human 
interest in incident or feeling. 

The poet and his companion set out in a postchaise, 
journeying by Linlithgow and Falkirk to Stirling. They 
visited 'a dirty, ugly place called Borrowstounness,' 
where he turned from the town to look across the Forth 
to Dunfermline and the fertile coast of Fife; Carron 
Iron Works, and the field of Bannockburn. They were 
shown the hole where Bruce set his standard, and the 
sight fired the patriotic ardour of the poet till he saw in 
imagination the two armies again in the thick of battle. 
After visiting the castle at Stirling, he left Nicol for a 
day, and paid a visit to Mrs. Chalmers of Harvieston. 
* Go to see Caudron Linn and Rumbling Brig and Deil's 
Mill.' That is all he has to say of the scenery; but in 
a letter to Gavin Hamilton he has much more to tell 
of Grace Chalmers and Charlotte, 'who is not only 
beautiful but lovely.' 

From Stirling the tourists proceeded northwards by 
Crieff and Glenalmond to Taymouth ; thence, keeping 



loo FAMOUS SCOTS 

by the banks of the river, to Aberfeldy, whose birks he 
immortalised in song. Here he had the good fortune 
to meet Niel Gow and to hear him playing. ' A short, 
stout-built, honest, Highland figure,' the poet describes 
him, 'with his greyish hair shed on his honest, social 
brow — an interesting face, marking strong sense, kind 
open-heartedness mixed with unmistaking simplicity.' 

By the Tummel they rode to Blair, going by Fascally 
and visiting — both those sentimental Jacobites — ' the 
gallant Lord Dundee's stone,' in the Pass of Killie- 
crankie. At Blair he met his friend Mr. Walker, who 
has left an account of the poet's visit ; while the two 
days which Burns spent here, he has declared, were 
among the happiest days of his life. 

' My curiosity,' Walker wrote, * was great to see how 
he would conduct himself in company so different from 
what he had been accustomed to. His manner was 
unembarrassed, plain, and firm. He appeared to have 
complete reliance on his own native good sense for 
directing his behaviour. He seemed at once to per- 
ceive and appreciate what was due to the company and 
to himself, and never to forget a proper respect for the 
separate species of dignity belonging to each. He did 
not arrogate conversation, but when led into it he spoke 
with ease, propriety, and manliness. He tried to exert 
his abilities, because he knew it was ability alone gave 
him a title to be there.' 

Burns certainly enjoyed his stay, and would, at the 
family's earnest sohcitation, have stayed longer, had the 
irascible and unreasonable Nicol allowed it. Here it 
was he met Mr. Graham of Fintry, and if he had stayed 
a day or two longer he would have met Dundas, a man 



ROBERT BURNS loi 

whose patronage might have done much to help the 
future fortunes of the poet. After leaving Blair, he 
visited, at the Duke's advice, the Falls of Bruar, and a 
few days afterwards he wrote from Inverness to Mr. 
Walker enclosing his verses. The Humble Petition of 
Bruar Water to the Noble Duke of Athole. 

Leaving Blair, they continued their journey northwards 
towards Inverness, viewing on the way the Falls of 
Foyers, — soon to be lost to Scotland, — which the poet 
celebrated in a fragment of verse. Of course two such 
Jacobites had to see Culloden Moor ; then they came 
through Nairn and Elgin, crossed the Spey at Fochabers, 
and Burns dined at Gordon Castle, the seat of the 
lively Duchess of Gordon, whom he had met in 
Edinburgh. Here again he was received with marked 
respect, and treated with the same Highland hospitality 
that had so charmed him at Blair; and here also 
the pleasure of the whole party was spoilt by the 
ill-natured jealousy of Nicol. That fiery dominie, 
imagining that he was slighted by Burns, who seemed 
to prefer the fine society of the Duchess and her friends 
to his amiable companionship, ordered the horses to 
be put to the carriage, and determined to set off alone. 
As the spiteful fellow would listen to no reason. Burns 
had e'en to accompany him, though much against his 
will. He sent his apologies to Her Grace in a song in 
praise of Castle Gordon. 

From Fochabers they drove to Banff, and thence to 
Aberdeen. In this city he was introduced to the Rev. 
John Skinner, a son of the author of Tullochgoriim, and 
was exceedingly disappointed when he learned that on 
his journey he had been quite near to the father's 



102 FAMOUS SCOTS 

parsonage, and had not called on the old man. Mr. 
Skinner himself regretted this, when he learned the 
fact from his son, as keenly as Burns did ; but the 
incident led to a correspondence between the two 
poets. From Aberdeen he came south by Stonehaven, 
where he ' met his relations,' and Montrose to Dundee. 
Hence the journey was continued through Perth, Kin- 
ross, and Queensferry, and so back to Edinburgh, i6th 
September 1787. 

His letter to his brother from Edinburgh is more 
meagre even than his journal, being simply a catalogue 
of the places visited. * Warm as I was from Ossian's 
country,' he remarks, ' what cared I for fishing towns or 
fertile carses?' Yet although the journal reads now 
and again like a railway time-table, we come across 
references which give proof of the poet's abounding 
interest in the locality of Scottish Song; and it was 
probably the case, as Professor Blackie writes, that 
' such a lover of the pure Scottish Muse could not fail 
when wandering from glen to glen to pick up fragments 
of traditional song, which, without his sympathetic touch, 
would probably have been lost.' 

Burns's wanderings were not yet, however, at an end. 
Probably he had expected on his return to Edinburgh 
some settlement with Creech, and was disappointed. 
Perhaps he was eager to revisit some places or people 
— Peggy Chalmers, no doubt — without being hampered 
in his movements by such a companion as Nicol. 
Anyhow, we find him setting out again on a tour 
through Clackmannan and Perthshire with his friend 
Dr. Adair, a warm but somewhat injudicious admirer 
of the poet's genius. It was probably about the 



ROBERT BURNS 103 

beginning of October that the two left Edinburgh, going 
round by Stirling to Harvieston, where they remained 
about ten days, and made excursions to the various 
parts of the surrounding scenery. The Caldron Linn 
and Rumbling Bridge were revisited, and they went to 
see Castle Campbell, the ancient seat of the family of 
Argyle. ' I am surprised,' the doctor ingenuously re- 
marks, 'that none of these scenes should have called 
forth an exertion of Burns's muse. But I doubt if he 
had much taste for the picturesque.' One wonders 
whether Dr. Adair had actually read the published 
poems. What a picture it must have been to see the 
party dragging Burns about, pointing out the best views, 
and then breathlessly waiting for a torrent of verse. 
The verses came afterwards, but they were addressed, 
not to the Ochils or the Devon, but to Peggy Chalmers. 

From Harvieston he went to Ochtertyre on the 
Teith to visit Mr. Ramsay, a reputed lover of Scottish 
literature; and thence he proceeded to Ochtertyre in 
Strathearn, in order to visit Sir William Murray. 

In a letter to Dr. Carrie, Mr. Ramsay speaks thus of 
Burns on this visit : ' I have been in the company of 
many men of genius, some of them poets, but never 
witnessed such flashes of intellectual brightness, the 
impulse of the moment, sparks of celestial fire ! I 
never was more delighted, therefore, than with his com- 
pany for two days' tete-a-tete.^ Of his residence with Sir 
William Murray he has left two poetical souvenirs, one 
On Scaring soine Water Fowl in Loch Turit, and the 
other, a love song, Blithe, Blithe, ajtd Merry was She, 
in honour of Miss Euphemia Murray, the flower of 
Strathearn. 



I04 FAMOUS SCOTS 

Returning to Haivieston, he went back with Dr. 
Adair to Edinburgh, by Kinross and Queensferry. At 
DunfermUne he visited the ruined abbey, where, kneel- 
ing, he kissed the stone above Bruce's grave. 

It was on this tour, too, that he visited at Clack- 
mannan an old Scottish lady, who claimed to be a 
lineal descendant of the family of Robert the Bruce. 
She conferred knighthood on the poet with the great 
double-handed sword of that monarch, and is said to 
have delighted him with the toast she gave after dinner, 
• Hooi Uncos,' which means literally, * Away Strangers,' 
and politically much more. 

The year 1787 was now drawing to a close, and Burns 
was still waiting for a settlement with Creech. He could 
not understand why he was kept hanging on from month 
to month. This was a way of doing business quite new 
to him, and after being put off again and again he at last 
began to suspect that there was something wrong. He 
doubted Creech's solvency; doubted even his honesty. 
More than ever was he eager to be settled in life, and 
he fretted under commercial delays he could not under- 
stand. On the first day of his return to Edinburgh he 
had written to Mr. Miller of Dalswinton, telling him of 
his ambitions, and making an offer to rent one of his 
farms. We know that he visited Dalswinton once or 
twice, but returned to Edinburgh. His only comfort at 
this time was the work he had begun in collecting 
Scottish songs for Johnson's Museum ; touching up old 
ones and writing new ones to old airs. This with Burns 
was altogether a labour of love. The idea of writing a song 
with a view to money-making was abhorrent to him. * He 
entered into the views of Johnson,' writes Chambers, ' with 



ROBERT BURNS 105 

an industry and earnestness which despised all money 
considerations, and which money could not have pur- 
chased ' ; while Allan Cunningham marvels at the number 
of songs Burns was able to write at a time when a sort of 
civil war was going on between him and Creech. An- 
other reason for staying through the winter in Edinburgh 
Burns may have had in the hope that through the in- 
fluence of his aristocratic friends some ofiice of profit, 
and not unworthy his genius, might have been found for 
him. Places of profit and honour were at the disposal 
of many who might have helped him had they so wished. 
But Burns was not now the favourite he had been when 
he first came to Edinburgh. The ploughman-poet was 
no longer a novelty ; and, moreover. Burns had the pride 
of his class, and clung to his early friends. It is not 
possible for a man to be the boon-companion of peasants 
and the associate of peers. Had he dissociated himself 
altogether from his past life, the doors of the nobility might 
have been still held open to him; and no doubt the 
cushioned ease of a sinecure's office would have been 
had for the asking. But in that case he would have lost 
his manhood, and we should have lost a poet. Burns 
would not have turned his back on his fellows for the 
most lucrative office in the kingdom; that, he would 
have considered as selling his soul to the devil. Yet, on 
the other hand, what could any of these men do for a 
poet who was * owre blate to seek, owre proud to snool ' ? 
Burns waited on in the expectation that those who had 
the power would take it upon themselves to do some- 
thing for him. Perhaps he credited them with a sense 
and a generosity they could not lay claim to; though 
had one of them taken the initiative in this matter, he 



io6 FAMOUS SCOTS 

would have honoured himself in honouring Burns, and 
endeared his name to the hearts of his countrymen 
for all time. But such offices are created and kept 
open for political sycophants, who can importune with 
years of prostituted service. They are for those 
who advocate the opinions of others ; certainly not for 
the man who dares to speak fearlessly his own mind, 
and to assert the privileges and prerogatives of his 
manhood. The children's bread is not to be thrown 
to the dogs. Burns asked for nothing, and got nothing. 
The Excise commission which he applied for, and 
graduated for, was granted. The work was laborious, 
the remuneration small, and gmiger was a name of 
contempt. 

But whilst waiting on in the hope of something 
'turning up,' he was still working busily for Johnson's 
Museum, and still trying to bring Creech to make a 
setdcment. At last, however, out of all patience with 
his publisher, and recognising the futility of his hopes of 
preferment, he had resolved early in December to leave 
Edinburgh, when he was compelled to stay against his 
will. A double accident befell him ; he was introduced 
to a Mrs. Maclehose, and three days afterwards, through 
the carelessness of a drunken coachman, he was thrown 
from a carriage, and had his knee severely bruised. 
The latter was an accident that kept him confined to 
his room for a time, and from which he quickly re- 
covered; but the meeting with Mrs. Maclehose was a 
serious matter, and for both, most unfortunate in its 
results. 

It was while he was 'on the rack of his present agony' 
that the Sylvan der-Clarinda correspondence was begun 



ROBERT BURNS 107 

and continued. That much may be said in excuse for 
Burns. A man, especially one with the passion and 
sensitiveness of a poet, cannot be expected to write in all 
sanity when he is racked by the pain of an injured limb. 
Certainly the poet does not show up in a pleasant light in 
this absurd interchange of gasping epistles ; nor does Mrs. 
Maclehose. *I like the idea of Arcadian names in a 
commerce of this kind,' he unguardedly admits. The 
most obvious comment that occurs to the mind of 
the reader is that they ought never to have been 
written. It is a pity they were written; more than a 
pity they were ever published. It seems a terrible 
thing that, merely to gratify the morbid curiosity of the 
world, the very love-letters of a man of genius should 
be made public. Is there nothing sacred in the lives 
of our great men ? * Did I imagine,' Burns remarked 
to Mrs. Basil Montagu in Dumfries, * that one half of the 
letters which I have written would be published when 
I die, I would this moment recall them and burn 
them without redemption.' 

After all, what was gained by publishing this corre- 
spondence? It adds literally nothing to our knowledge 
of the poet. He could have, and has, given more of 
himself in a verse than he gives in the whole series 
of letters signed Sylvander. Occasionally he is natural 
in them, but rarely. 'I shall certainly be ashamed of 
scrawling whole sheets of incoherence.' We trust he 
was. The letters are false in sentiment, stilted in 
diction, artificial in morality. We have a picture of the 
poet all through trying to batter himself into a passion 
he does not feel, into love of an accomplished and in- 
tellectual woman ; v/hile in his heart's core is registered 



io8 FAMOUS SCOTS 

the image of Jean Armour, the mother of his children. 
He shows his paces before Clarinda and tears passion to 
tatters in inflated prose ; he poses as a stylist, a moralist, 
a religious enthusiast, a poet, a man of the world, and 
now and again accidentally he assumes the face and figure 
of Robert Burns. We read and wonder if this be really 
the same man who wrote in his journal, 'The whining 
cant of love, except in real passion and by a masterly 
hand, is to me as insufferable as the preaching cant of 
old father Smeaton, Whig minister at Kilmaurs. Darts, 
flames, cupids, love graces and all that farrago are just 
... a senseless rabble.' 

Clarinda comes out of the correspondence better than 
Sylvander. Her letters are more natural and vastly 
more clever. She grieves to hear of his accident, and 
sympathises with him in his suffering ; were she his sister 
she would call and see him. He is too romantic in his 
style of address, and must remember she is a married 
woman. Would he wait like Jacob seven years for a 
wife ? And perhaps be disappointed ! She is not un- 
happy : religion has been her balm for every woe. She 
had read his autobiography as Desdemona listened to 
the narration of Othello, but she was pained because of 
his hatred of Calvinism; he must study it seriously. 
She could well believe him when he said that no woman 
could love as ardently as himself. The only woman 
for him would be one qualified for the companion, the 
friend, and the mistress. The last might gain Sylvander, 
but the others alone could keep him. She admires him 
for his continued fondness for Jean, who perhaps does 
not possess his tenderest, faithfulest friendship. How 
could that bonnie lassie refuse him after such proofs of 



ROBERT BURNS 109 

love? But he must not rave; he must hmit himself to 
friendship. The evening of their third meeting was one 
of the most exquisite she had ever experienced. Only 
he must now know she has faults. She means well, but 
is liable to become the victim of her sensibility. She 
too now prefers the religion of the bosom. She cannot 
deny his power over her : would he pay another evening 
visit on Saturday ? 

When the poet is leaving Edinburgh, Clarinda is heart- 
broken. ' Oh, let the scenes of nature remind you of 
Clarinda ! In winter, remember the dark shades of her 
fate; in summer, the warmth of her friendship; in 
autumn, her glowing wishes to bestow plenty on all ; and 
let spring animate you with hopes that your friend may 
yet surmount the wintry blasts of life, and revive to taste 
a spring-time of happiness. At all events, Sylvander, 
the storms of life will quickly pass, and one unbounded 
spring encircle all. Love, there, is not a crime. I 
charge you to meet me there, O God ! I must lay down 
my pen.' 

Poor Clarinda ! Well for her peace of mind that the 
poet was leaving her ; well for Burns, also, that he was 
leaving Clarinda and Edinburgh. Only one thing 
remained for both to do, and it had been wise, to burn 
their letters. Would that Clarinda had been as much 
alive to her own good name, and the poet's fair fame, as 
Peggy Chalmers, who did not preserve her letters from 
Burns ! 

It was February 1788 before Burns could settle with 
Creech ; and, after discharging all expenses, he found a 
balance in his favour of about five hundred pounds. To 
Gilbert, who was in sore need of the money, he advanced 



no FAMOUS SCOTS 

one hundred and eighty pounds, as his contribution to 
the support of their mother. With what remained of 
the money he leased from Mr. Miller of Dalswinton 
the farm of Ellisland, on which he entered at Whit- 
sunday 1788. 



CHAPTER VII 



ELLISLAND 



When Burns turned his back on Edinburgh in Feb- 
ruary 1788, and set his face resolutely towards his native 
county and the work that awaited him, he left the city a 
happier and healthier man than he had been all the 
months of his sojourn in it. The times of aimless roving, 
and of still more demoraUsing hanging on in the hope of 
something being done for him, were at an end ; he looked 
to the future with self-reliance. His vain hopes of pre- 
ferment were already * thrown behind and far away,' and 
he saw clearly that by the labour of his own hands he 
had to live, independent of the dispensations of patron- 
age, and trusting no longer to the accidents of fortune. 
' The thoughts of a home,' to quote Cunningham's words, 
• of a settled purpose in life, gave him a silent gladness 
of heart such as he had never before known.' 

Burns, though he had hoped and was disappointed, 
left the city not so much with bitterness as with contempt. 
If he had been received on this second visit with punctil- 
ious politeness, more ceremoniously than cordially, it 
was just as he had himself expected. Gossip, too, had 
been busy while he was absent, and his sayings and 
doings had been bruited abroad. His worst fault was 
that he was a shrewd observer of men, and drew, in a 



112 FAMOUS SCOTS 

memorandum book he kept, pen-portraits of the people 
he met. * Dr Blair is merely an astonishing proof of 
what industry and application can do. Natural parts 
like his are frequently to be met with ; his vanity is pro- 
verbially known among his acquaintance.' The Lord 
Advocate he pictured in a verse : 

' He clenched his pamphlets in his fist, 

He quoted and he hinted, 
Till in a declamation-mist, 

His argument he tint it. 
He gap'd for't, he grap'd for't, 

He fand it was awa, man ; 
But what his common sense came short, 

He eked it out wi' law, man.' 

Had pen-portraits, such as these, been merely carica- 
tures, they might have been forgiven ; but, unfortunately, 
they were convincing likenesses, therefore libels. We 
doubt not, as Cunningham tells us, that the literati of 
Edinburgh were not displeased when such a man left 
them ; they could never feel at their ease so long as he 
was in their midst. ' Nor were the titled part of the 
community without their share in this silent rejoicing ; 
his presence was a reproach to them. The illustrious 
of his native land, from whom he had looked for patron- 
age, had proved that they had the carcass of greatness, 
but wanted the soul ; they subscribed for his poems, and 
looked on their generosity " as an alms could keep a god 
alive." He turned his back on Edinburgh, and from that 
time forward scarcely counted that man his friend who 
spoke of titled persons in his presence.' 

It was with feelings of relief, also, that Bums left the 
super-scholarly litterateurs ; ' white curd of asses' milk,' 
he called them ; gentlemen who reminded him of some 



ROBERT BURNS 113 

spinsters in his country who ' spin their thread so fine 
that it is neither fit for weft nor woof.' To such men, 
recognising only the culture of schools, a genius like 
Burns was a puzzle, easier dismissed than solved. Burns 
saw them, in all their tinsel of academic tradition, 
through and through. 

Coming from Edinburgh to the quiet home-life of 
Mossgiel was like coming out of the vitiated atmosphere 
of a ballroom into the pure and bracing air of early 
morning. Away from the fever of city life, he only 
gradually comes back to sanity and health. The artifi- 
ciaUties and aff"ectations of polite society are not to be 
thrown off in a day's time. Hardly had he arrived at 
Mauchline before he penned a letter to Clarinda, that 
simply staggers the reader with the shameless and heart- 
less way in which it speaks of Jean Armour. ' I am 
dissatisfied with her — 1 cannot endure her ! I, while my 
heart smote me for the profanity, tried to compare her 
with my Clarinda. 'Twas setting the expiring glimmer 
of a farthing taper beside the cloudless glory of the 
meridian sun. Here was tasteless insipidity, vulgarity 
of soul, and mercenary fawning; there, polished good 
sense, heaven-born genius, and the most generous, the 
most delicate, the most tender passion. I have done 
with her, and she with me.' 

Poor Jean ! Think of her too confiding and trustful 
love written down mercenary fawning ! But this was not 
Burns. The whole letter is false and vulgar. Perhaps 
he thought to please his Clarinda by the comparison ; 
she had little womanly feeling if she felt flattered. Let 
us believe, for her own sake, that she was disgusted. 
His letter to Ainslie, ten days later, is something very 



114 FAMOUS SCOTS 

different, though even yet he gives no hint of acknow- 
ledging Jean as his wife. ' Jean I found banished hke a 
martyr — forlorn, destitute, and friendless — all for the 
good old cause, I have reconciled her to her fate ; I 
have reconciled her to her mother ; I have taken her a 
room ; I have taken her to my arms ; I have given her a 
guinea, and I have embraced her till she rejoiced with 
joy unspeakable and full of glory.' 

This is flippant in tone, but something more manly in 
sentiment; Burns was coming to his senses. On 13th 
June, twin girls were born to Jean, but they only lived 
a few days. On the same day their father wrote from 
EUisland to Mrs. Dunlop a letter, in which we see the 
real Burns, true to the best feelings of his nature, and 
true to his sorely-tried and long-suffering wife. ' This 
is the second day, my honoured friend, that I have been 
on my farm. A solitary inmate of an old smoky spence, 
far from every object I love, or by whom I am beloved ; 
nor any acquaintance older than yesterday, except Jenny 
Geddes, the old mare I ride on ; while uncouth cares 
and novel plans hourly insult my awkward ignorance and 
bashful inexperience. . . . Your surmise, madam, is just ; 
I am, indeed, a husband. . . . You are right that a 
bachelor state would have ensured me more friends; 
but, from a cause you will easily guess, conscious peace 
in the enjoyment of my own mind, and unmistrusting 
confidence in approaching my God, would seldom have 
been of the number. I found a once much-loved and 
still much-loved female, literally and truly cast out to the 
mercy of the naked elements ; but I enabled her to 
purchase a shelter, — there is no sporting with a fellow- 
creature's happiness or misery.' 



ROBERT BURNS 115 

It was not till August that the marriage was ratified 
by the Church, when Robert Burns and Jean Armour 
were rebuked for their acknowledged irregularity, and 
admonished 'to adhere faithfully to one another, as man 
and wife, all the days of their life.' 

This was the only fit and proper ending of Burns's 
acquaintance with Jean Armour. As an honourable 
man, he could not have done otherwise than he did. 
To have deserted her now, and married another, even 
admitting he was legally free to do so, which is doubtful, 
would have been the act of an abandoned wretch, and 
certainly have wrought ruin in the moral and spiritual 
life of the poet. In taking Jean as his wedded wife, he 
acted not only honourably, but wisely ; and wisdom and 
prudence were not always distinguishing qualities of 
Robert Burns. 

Some months had to elapse, however, before the wife 
could join her husband at Ellisland. The first thing he 
had to do when he entered on his lease was to rebuild 
the dwelling-house, he himself lodging in the meanwhile 
in the smoky spence which he mentions in his letter to 
Mrs. Dunlop. In the progress of the building he not 
only took a lively interest, but actually worked with his 
own hands as a labourer, and gloried in his strength : 
'he beat all for a dour lift.' But it was some time 
before he could settle down to the necessarily mono- 
tonous work of farming. 'My late scenes of idleness 
and dissipation,' he confessed to Dunbar, 'have ener- 
vated my mind to a considerable degree.' He was rest- 
less and rebellious at times, and we are not surprised 
to find the sudden settUng down from gaiety and travel 
to the home-life of a farmer marked by bursts of im- 



ii6 FAMOUS SCOTS 

patience, irritation, and discontent. The only steadying 
influence was the thought of his wife and children, and 
the responsibility of a husband and a father. He grew 
despondent occasionally, and would gladly have been 
at rest, but a wife and children bound him to struggle 
with the stream. His melancholy blinded him even to 
the good qualities of his neighbours. The only things 
he saw in perfection were stupidity and canting. ' Prose 
they only know in graces, prayers, etc., and the value 
of these they estimate, as they do their plaiding webs, 
by the ell. As for the Muses, they have as much an 
idea of a rhinoceros as of a poet.' He was, in fact, 
ungracious towards his neighbours, not that they were 
boorish or uninformed folk, but simply because, though 
living at EUisland in body, his mind was in Ayrshire 
with his darling Jean, and he was looking to the future 
when he should have a home and a wife of his own. His 
eyes would ever wander to the west, and he sang, to 
cheer him in his loneliness, a song of love to his Bonnie 
Jean: 

* Of a' the airts the wind can blaw, 

I dearly lo'e the west ; 
For there the bonnie lassie lives, 
The lassie I lo'e best.' 

It was not till the beginning of December that he was 
in a position to bring his wife and children to EUisland ; 
and this event brought him into kindlier relations with 
his fellow-farmers. His neighbours gathered to bid his 
wife welcome ; and drank to the roof-tree of the house 
of Burns. The poet, now that he had made his home 
amongst them, was regarded as one of themselves; 
while Burns, on his part, having at last got his wife and 



ROBERT BURNS 117 

children beside him, was in a healthier frame of mind 
and more charitably disposed towards those who had 
come to give them a welcome. That he was now as 
one settled in life with something worthy to live for, 
we have ample proof in his letter written to Mrs. Dunlop 
on the first day of the New Year. It is discursive, yet 
philosophical and reflective, and its whole tone is that 
of a man who looks on the world round about him with 
a kindly charity, and looks to the future with faith and 
trust. Life passed very sweetly and peacefully with the 
poet and his family for a time here. The farm, it would 
appear, was none of the best, — Mr. Cunningham told him 
he had made a poet's not a farmer's choice, — but Burns 
was hopeful and worked hard. Yet the labour of the 
farm was not to be his life-work. Even while waiting 
impatiently the coming of his wife, he had been con- 
tributing to Johnson's Museum, and he fondly imagined 
that he was going to be farmer, poet, and exciseman 
all in one. Some have regretted his appointment to 
the Excise at this time, and attributed to his frequent 
absences from home his failure as a farmer. They 
may be right. But what was the poet to do? He 
knew by bitter experience how precarious the business 
of farming was, and thought that a certain salary, even 
though small, would always stand between his family 
and absolute want. * I know not,' he wrote to Ainslie, 
'how the word exciseman, or, still more opprobrious, 
ganger, will sound in your ears. I too have seen the 
day when my auditory nerves would have felt very 
delicately on this subject ; but a wife and children have 
a wonderful power in blunting these kind of sensations. 
Fifty pounds a year for life and a pension for widows 



ii8 FAMOUS SCOTS 

and orphans, you will allow, is no bad settlement for a 
foet.^ And to Blacklock he wrote in verse : 

' But what d'ye think, my trusty fier, 
I'm turned a gauger — Peace be here ! 
Parnassian queans, I fear, I fear, 
Ye'll now disdain me ! 
And then my fifty pounds a year 
Will little gain me. 

I hae a wife and twa wee laddies, 

They maun hae brose and brats o' duddies ; 

Ye ken yoursel's my heart right proud is — 

I needna vaunt, 
But I'll sned besoms — thraw saugh woodies, 

Before they want. 

But to conclude my silly rhyme 

(I'm scant o' verse, and scant o' time), 

To make a happy fireside clime 

To weans and wife. 
That's the true pathos and sublime 

Of human life.' 

This was nobly said; and the poet spoke from the 
heart. 

Not content with being ganger, farmer, and poet. 
Burns took a lively interest in everything affecting the 
welfare of the parish and the well-being of its inhabitants. 
For this was no poet of the study, holding himself aloof 
from the affairs of the world, and fearing the contamina- 
tion of his kind. Burns was ahve all-round, and always 
acted his part in the world as a husband and father ; as 
a citizen and a man. He made himself the poet of 
humanity, because he himself was so intensely human, 
and joyed and sorrowed with his fellows. At this time 
he established a library in Dunscore, and himself under- 



ROBERT BURNS 119 

took the whole management, — drawing out rules, pur- 
chasing books, acting for a time as secretary, treasurer, 
and committee all in one. Among the volumes he 
ordered were several of his old favourites. The Spectator, 
The Man of Feeling, and The Lounger) and we know 
that there was on the shelves even a folio Hebrew 
Concordance. 

A favourite walk of the poet's while he stayed here 
was along Nithside, where he often wandered to take a 
* gloamin' shot at the Muses.' Here, after a fall of rain, 
Cunningham records, the poet loved to walk, listening 
to the roar of the river, or watching it bursting impetu- 
ously from the groves of Friar's Carse. 'Thither he 
walked in his sterner moods, when the world and its 
ways touched his spirit ; and the elder peasants of the 
vale still show the point at which he used to pause and 
look on the red and agitated stream.' 

In spite of his multifarious duties, he was now more 
than ever determined to make his name as a poet. To 
Dr. Moore he wrote (4th January 1789) : 'The character 
and employment of a poet were formerly my pleasure, 
but now my pride. . . . Poesy I am determined to 
prosecute with all my vigour. Nature has given very 
few, if any, of the profession the talents of shining in 
every species of composition. I shall try (for until trial 
it is impossible to know) whether she has qualified me 
to shine in any one.' 

It was inevitable that one whose district as an excise- 
man reached far and wide could not regularly attend to 
ploughing, sowing, and reaping, and the farm was very 
often left to the care of servants. Dr. Currie appears 
to count it as a reproach that his farm no longer occupied 



I20 FAMOUS SCOTS 

the principal part of his care or his thoughts. Yet it 
could not have been otherwise. Burns after having 
undertaken a duty would attend to it religiously, and 
we know that he pursued his work throughout his ten 
parishes diligently, faithfully, and with unvarying punctu- 
ality. Others have bemoaned that those frequent Excise 
excursions led the poet into temptation, that he was 
being continually assailed by the sin that so easily beset 
him. Let it be admitted frankly that the temptations 
to social excess were great ; is it not all the more 
creditable to Burns that he did not sink under those 
temptations and become the besotted wreck conventional 
biography has attempted to make him ? If those who 
raise this plaint mean to insinuate that Burns became 
a confirmed toper, then they are assuredly wrong ; if they 
be only drawing attention to the fact that drinking was 
too common in Scotland at that time, then they are 
attacking not the poet but the social customs of his 
day. It would be easy if we were to accept *the 
general impression of the place,' and go by the tale 
of gossip, to show that Burns was demoralised by his 
duties as a ganger, and sank into a state of maudlin 
intemperance. But ascertained fact and the testimony 
of unimpeachable authority are at variance with the 
voice of gossip. ' So much the worse for fact,' biography 
would seem to have said, and gaily sped on the work of 
defamation. We only require to forget Allan Cunning- 
ham's Personal Sketch of the Poet, the letters from Mr. 
Findlater and Mr. Gray, and to close our eyes to the 
excellence of the poetry of this period, in order to see 
Burns on the downgrade, and to preach grand moral 
lessons from the text of a wasted life. 



ROBERT BURNS 121 

But, after all, ' facts are chiels that winna ding,' and 
we must take them into account, however they may 
baulk us of grand opportunities of plashing in watery 
sentiment. Speaking of the poet's biographers, Mr. 
Findlater remarks that they have tried to outdo one 
another in heaping obloquy on his name ; they have 
made his convivial habits, habitual drunkenness; his 
wit and humour, impiety ; his social talents, neglect of 
duty; and have accused him of every vice. Then he 
gives his testimony : ' My connection with Robert 
Burns commenced immediately after his admission into 
the Excise, and continued to the hour of his death. 
In all that time the superintendence of his behaviour as 
an officer of the revenue was a branch of my especial 
province ; and it may be supposed I would not be an 
inattentive observer of the general conduct of a man 
and a poet so celebrated by his countrymen. In the 
former capacity, so far from its being impossible for 
him to discharge the duties of his office with that 
regularity which is almost indispensable, as is palpably 
assumed by one of his biographers, and insinuated, not 
very obscurely even, by Dr. Currie, he was exemplary 
in his attention as an Excise officer, and was even 
jealous of the least imputation on his vigilance.' 

But a glance at the poems and songs of this period 
would be a sufficient vindication of the poet's good 
name. There are considerably over a hundred songs 
and poems written during his stay at Ellisland, many 
of them of his finest. The third volume of Johnson's 
Museum, published in February 1790, contained no 
fewer than forty songs by Burns. Among the Ellisland 
songs were such as, Ve Banks and Braes 0' Bonnie 



122 FAMOUS SCOTS 

Doon, Auld Lang Syne, Willie brewed a Peck d Maut, 
To Mary in Heaven, Of a' the Airts the Wind can Maw, 
My Love she's but a Lassie yet, Tarn Glen, John Anderson 
viy Jo, songs that have become the property of the 
world. Of the last-named song, Angellier remarks that 
the hnagination of the poet must have indeed explored 
every situation of love to have led him to that which 
he in his own experience could not have known. Even 
the song Willie breived a Peck o' Maut, the first of 
bacchanalian ditties, is the work of a man of sane 
mind and healthy appetite. It is not of the diseased 
imagination of drunken genius. But the greatest poem 
of this period, and one of Burns's biggest achievements, 
is Tarn o^ Shanter. This poem was written in answer 
to a request of Captain Grose that the poet would 
provide a witch story to be printed along with a drawing 
of Alloway Kirk, and was first published in Grose's 
Antiquities of Scotland. We have been treated by 
several biographers to a private view of the poet, with 
wild gesticulations, agonising in the composition of this 
poem ; but where his wife did not venture to intrude, we 
surely need not seek to desecrate. ' I stept aside with 
the bairns among the broom,' says Bonnie Jean ; not, we 
should imagine, to leave room for aliens and strangers. 
He has been again burlesqued for us rending himself 
in rhyme, and stretched on straw groaning elegiacs to 
Mary in heaven. All this is mere sensationalism pro- 
vided for illiterate readers. We have the poem, and its 
excellence sufficeth. 

It is worthy of note that in Tarn <?' Shanter, as well as 
in To Mary in Heaven, the poet goes back to his earlier 
years in Ayrshire. They are posthumous products of 



ROBERT BURNS 123 

the inspiration which gave us the Kilmarnock Edition. 
I am not inclined to agree with Carlyle in his estimate 
of Tarn d Shanter. It is not the composition of a man 
of great talent, but of a man of transcendent poetical 
genius. The story itself is a conception of genius, and 
in the narration the genius is unquestionable. It is a 
panorama of pictures so vivid and powerful that the 
characters and scenes are fixed indelibly on the mind, 
and abide with us a cherished literary possession. After 
reading the poem, the words are recalled without 
conscious effort of memory, but as the only possible 
embodiment of the mental impressions retained. Short 
as the poem is, there is in it character, humour, pathos, 
satire, indignation, tenderness, fun, frolic, diablerie, 
almost every human feeling. I have heard Burns in 
the writing of this poem likened to a composer at an 
organ improvising a piece of music in which, before he 
has done, he has used every stop and touched every 
note on the keyboard. Even the weakest lines of the 
piece, which mark a dramatic pause in the rapid narra- 
tion, have a distinctive beauty and are the most frequently 
quoted lines of the poem. In artistic word-painting 
and graphic phrasing Burns is here at his best. His 
description of the horrible is worthy of Shakspeare ; and 
it is questionable if even the imagination of that master 
ever conceived anything more awful than the scene and 
circumstance of the infernal orgies of those witches and 
warlocks. What Zolaesque realism there is ! In the 
line, 'The grey hairs yet stack to the heft,' all the 
gruesomeness of murder is compressed into a distich. 
Yet the horrible details are controlled and unified in 
the powerful imagination of the poet. We believe Dr. 



124 FAMOUS SCOTS 

Blacklock was right in thinking that this poem, though 
Burns had never written another syllable, would have 
made him a high reputation. Certainly it was not the 
work of a man daily dazing his faculties with drink; 
no more was that exquisite lyric To Mary in Heaven, 
Another poem of this period deserving special mention 
is The Whistle^ not merely because of its dramatic force 
and lyrical beauty, but because it gives a true picture 
of the drinking customs of the time. And again I dare 
assert that this is not the work of a mind enfeebled or 
debased by drink. It is a bit of simple, direct, sincere 
narration, humanly healthy in tone ; the ideas are clear 
and consecutive, and the language fitting. It is not so 
that drunken genius expresses itself. The language of 
a poetical mind enfeebled by alcohol or opium is 
frequently mystic and musical; it never deals with the 
realities and responsibilities of life, but in a witchery 
of words winds and meanders through the realms of 
reverie and dream. It may be sweet and sensuous; 
it is rarely narrative or simple; never direct nor 
forcible. 

In the Kirk's Alarm, wherein he again reverted to 
his Mossgiel period, he displayed all his former force of 
satire, as well as his sympathy with those who advocated 
rational views in religion. Dr. Macgill had written a 
book which the Kirk declared to be heretical, and 
Burns, at the request of some friends, fought for the 
doctor in his usual way, though with little hope of doing 
him any good. 'Ajax's shield consisted, I think, of 
seven bull-hides and a plate of brass, which altogether 
set Hector's utmost force at defiance. Alas ! I am not 
a Hector, and the worthy doctor's foes are as securely 



ROBERT BURNS 125 

armed as Ajax was. Ignorance, superstition, bigotry, 
stupidity, malevolence, self-conceit, envy — all strongly 
bound in a massy frame of brazen impudence ; to such 
a shield humour is the peck of a sparrow and satire the 
pop-gun of a schoolboy. Creation-disgracing scel^rats 
such as they, God only can mend, and the devil only 
can punish.' The doctor yielded, Cunningham tells 
us, and was forgiven, but not the poet; pertinently 
adding, * so much more venial is it in devout men's eyes 
to be guilty of heresy than of satire.' 

Into political as well as theological matters Burns 
also entered with all his wonted enthusiasm. Of his 
election ballads, the best, perhaps, are The Five Carlins 
and the Epistle to Mr. Grahatn of Fintry, But these 
ballads are not to be taken as a serious addition to the 
poet's works; he did not wish them to be so taken. 
He was a man as well as a poet ; was interested with 
his neighbours in political affairs, and in the day of 
battle fought with the weapons he could wield with 
effect. Nor are his ballads always to be taken as 
representing his political principles ; these he expressed 
in song that did not owe its inspiration to the excite- 
ment of elections. Burns was not a party man ; he had 
in politics, as in religion, some broad general principles, 
but he had ' the warmest veneration for individuals of 
both parties.' The most important verse in his Epistle 
to Graham of Fintry is the last : 

' For your poor friend, the Bard, afar 
He hears and only hears the war, 

A cool spectator purely : 
So, when the storm the forest rends, 
The robin in the hedge descends, 

And sober chirps securely.' 



126 FAMOUS SCOTS 

Burns's life was, therefore, quite full at EUisland, too 
full indeed ; for, towards the end of 1791, we find him 
disposing of the farm, and looking to the Excise alone 
for a livelihood. In the farm he had sunk the greater 
part of the profits of his Edinburgh Edition; and now 
it was painfully evident that the money was lost. He 
had worked hard enough, but he was frequently absent, 
and a farm thrives only under the eye of a master. On 
Excise business he was accustomed to ride at least two 
hundred miles every week, and so could have little 
time to give to his fields. Besides this, the soil of 
Ellisland had been utterly exhausted before he entered 
on his lease, and consequently made a miserable return 
for the labour expended on it. The friendly relations 
that had existed between him and his landlord were 
broken off before now ; and towards the close of his stay 
at Ellisland Burns spoke rather bitterly of Mr. Miller's 
selfish kindness. Miller was, in fact, too much of a lord 
and master, exacting submission as well as rent from his 
tenants ; while Burns was of too haughty a spirit to beck 
and bow to any man. ' The life of a farmer is,' he wrote 
to Mrs. Dunlop, 'as a farmer paying a dear, unconscion- 
able rent, a cursed life. . . . Devil take the life of reap- 
ing the fruits that others must eat ! ' 

The poet, too, had been overworking himself, and was 
again subject to his attacks of hypochondria. 'I feel 
that horrid hypochondria pervading every atom of both 
body and soul. This farm has undone my enjoyment 
of myself. It is a ruinous affair on all hands.' In the 
midst of his troubles and vexations with his farm, he 
began to look more hopefully to the Excise, and to see 
in the future a life of literary ease, when he could devote 



ROBERT BURNS 127 

himself wholly to the Muses. He had already got 
ranked on the list as supervisor, an appointment that he 
reckoned might be worth one hundred or two hundred 
pounds a year ; and this determined him to quit the farm 
entirely, and to try to make a living by one profession. 
As farmer, exciseman, and poet he had tried too much, 
and even a man of his great capacity for work was bound 
to have succumbed under the strain. Even had the 
farm not proved the ruinous bargain it did, we imagine 
that he must have been compelled sooner or later to 
relinquish one of the two, either his farm or his Excise 
commission. Circumstances decided for him, and in 
December 1791 he sold by auction his stock and im- 
plements, and removed to Dumfries, ' leaving nothing at 
Ellisland but a putting-stone, with which he loved to 
exercise his strength ; a memory of his musings, which 
can never die ; and three hundred pounds of his money, 
sunk beyond redemption in a speculation from which 
all augured happiness.' 



CHAPTER VIII 



DUMFRIES 



When Burns removed from Ellisland to Dumfries, he 
took up his abode in a small house of three apartments 
in the Wee Vennel. Here he stayed till Whitsunday 
1793, when the family removed to a detached house of 
two storeys in the Mill Vennel. A mere closet nine 
feet square was the poet's writing-room in this house, 
and it was in the bedroom adjoining that he died. 

The few years of his residence in Dumfries have been 
commonly regarded as a period of poverty and intem- 
perance. But his intemperance has always been most 
religiously exaggerated, and we doubt not also that the 
poverty of the family at this time has been made to 
appear worse than it was. Burns had not a salary 
worthy of his great abilities, it is true, but there is good 
reason to believe that the family lived in comparative 
ease and comfort, and that there were luxuries in their 
home, which neither father nor mother had known in 
their younger days. Burns liked to see his Bonnie Jean 
neat and trim, and she went as braw as any wife of 
the town. Though we know that he wrote painfully, 
towards the end of his life, for the loan of paltry sums, we 
are to regard this as a sign more of temporary embarrass- 
ment than of a continual struggle to make ends meet. 



ROBERT BURNS 129 

The word debt grated so harshly on Burns's ears that he 
could not be at peace with himself so long as the pettiest 
account remained unpaid; and if he had no ready 
money in his hands to meet it, he must e'en borrow 
from a friend. His income, when he settled in Dum- 
fries, was 'down money ^^o per annum,' and there 
were perquisites which must have raised it to eighty or 
ninety. Though his hopes of preferment were never 
realised, he tried his best on this slender income 'to 
make a happy fireside clime to weans and wife,' and in 
a sense succeeded. 

What he must have felt more keenly than anything 
else in leaving Ellisland was, that in giving up farming 
he was making an open confession of failure in his ideal 
of combining in himself the farmer, the poet, and the 
exciseman. There was a stigma also attaching to the 
name of gauger, that must often have been galling to 
the spirit of Burns. The ordinary labourer utters the 
word with dry contempt, as if he were speaking of a spy. 
But the thoughts of a wife and bairns had already prevailed 
over prejudice ; he realised the responsibilities of a hus- 
band and father, and pocketed his pride. A great change 
it must have been to come from the quiet and seclusion 
of Ellisland to settle down in the midst of the busy life 
of an important burgh. 

Life in provincial towns in Scotland in those days was 
simply frittered away in the tittle-tattle of cross and 
causeway, and the insipid talk of taverns. The most 
trifling incidents of everyday life were dissected and dis- 
cussed, and magnified into events of the first importance. 
Many residents had no trade or profession whatever. 
Annuitants and retired merchants built themselves 
9 



I30 FAMOUS SCOTS 

houses, had their portraits painted in oil, and thereafter 
strutted into an aristocracy. Without work, without hobby, 
without healthy recreation, and cursed with inglorious 
leisure, they simply dissipated time until they should pass 
into eternity. The only amusement such lumpish crea- 
tures could have was to meet in some inn or tavern, and 
swill themselves into a debauched joy of life. Dumfries, 
when Burns came to it in 1791, was no better and no 
worse than its neighbours ; and we can readily imagine 
how eagerly such a man would be welcomed by its 
pompously dull and leisured topers. Now might their 
meetings be lightened with flashes of genius, and the lazy 
hours of their long nights go fleeting by on the wings of 
wit and eloquence. Too often in Dumfries was Burns 
wiled into the howffs and haunts of these seasoned casks. 
They could stand heavy drinking ; the poet could not. 
He was too highly strung, and if he had consulted his 
own inclination would rather have shunned than sought 
the company of men who met to quaff" their quantum of 
wine and sink into sottish sleep. For Burns was never 
a drunkard, not even in Dumfries ; though the contrary 
has been asserted so often that it has all the honour that 
age and the respectability of authority can give it. There 
was with him no animal craving for drink, nor has he 
been convicted of solitary drinking ; but he was intensely 
convivial, and drank, as Professor Blackie put it, 'only 
as the carnal seasoning of a rampant intellectuality.' 
There is no doubt that he came to Dumfries a com- 
paratively pure and sober man ; and if he now began to 
frequent the Globe Tavern, often to cast his pearls before 
swine, let it be remembered that he was compelled 
frequently to meet there strangers and tourists who had 



ROBERT BURNS 131 

journeyed for the express purpose of meeting the poet. 
Nowadays writers and professional men have their 
clubs, and in general frequent them more regularly than 
Burns ever haunted the howffs of Dumfries. But 
we have heard too much about 'the poet's moral 
course after he settled in Dumfries being down- 
ward.' 'From the time of his migration to Dum- 
fries,' Principal Shairp soberly informs us, *it would 
appear that he was gradually dropped out of acquaintance 
by most of the Dumfriesshire lairds, as he had long been 
by the parochial and other ministers.' Poor lairds ! 
Poor ministers ! If they preferred their own talk of 
crops and cattle and meaner things to the undoubted 
brilliancy of Burns's conversation, surely their dulness 
and want of appreciation is not to be laid to the charge 
of the poet. I doubt not had the poet lived to a good 
old age he would have been gradually dropped out of 
acquaintance by some who have not scrupled to write 
his biography. Politics, it is admitted, may have formed 
the chief element in the lairds' and ministers' aversion, 
but there is a hint that his irregular life had as much 
to do with it. Is it to be seriously contended 
that these men looked askance at Burns because 
of his occasional convivialities? ' Madam,' he answered 
a lady who remonstrated with him on this very subject, 
' they would not thank me for my company if I did not 
drink with them.' These lairds, perhaps even these 
ministers, could in all probability stand their three 
bottles with the best, and were more likely to drop the 
acquaintance of one who would not drink bottle for 
bottle with them than of one who indulged to excess. 
It was considered a breach of hospitality not to imbibe 



132 FAMOUS SCOTS 

so long as the host ordained ; and in many cases glasses 
were supplied so constructed that they had to be drained 
at every toast. • Occasional hard drinking,' he confessed 
to Mrs. Dunlop, ' is the devil to me ; against this I have 
again and again set my resolution, and have greatly 
succeeded. Taverns I have totally abandoned ; it is the 
private parties in the family way among the hard-drink- 
ing gentlemen of this county that do me the mischief; 
but even this I have more than half given over.' Most 
assuredly whatever these men charged against Robert 
Burns it was not drunkenness. But he has been accused 
of mixing with low company ! That is something 
nearer the mark, and goes far to explain the aversion of 
those stately Tories. But again, what is meant by low 
company? Are we to believe that the poet made 
associates of depraved and abandoned men? Not for 
a moment ! This low company was nothing more than 
men in the rank of life into which he had been born ; 
mechanics, tradesmen, farmers, ploughmen, who did not 
move in the aristocratic circles of patrician lairds or 
ministers ordained to preach the gospel to the poor. 
It was simply the old, old cry of 'associating with 
publicans and sinners.' 

We do not defend nor seek to hide the poet's aberra- 
tions ; he confessed them remorselessly, and condemned 
himself. But we do raise our voice against the ex- 
aggeration of occasional over-indulgence into confirmed 
debauchery ; and dare assert that Burns was as sober a 
man as the average lairds and ministers who had the 
courage of their prejudices, and wrote themselves down 
asses to all posterity. 

But here again the work the poet managed to do is a 



ROBERT BURNS 133 

sufficient disproof of his irregular life. He was at this 
time, besides working hard at his Excise business, writing 
ballads and songs, correcting for Creech the two-volume 
edition of his poems, and managing somehow or other 
to find time for a pretty voluminous correspondence. 
His hands were full and his days completely occupied. 
He would not have been an Excise officer very long had 
he been unable to attend to his duties. William Wallace, 
the editor of Chambers's Burns, has studied very carefully 
this period of the poet's life, and found that in those 
days of petty faultfinding he has not once been repri- 
manded, either for drunkenness or for dereliction of duty. 
There were spies and informers about who would not 
have left the Excise Commissioners uninformed of the 
paltriest charge they could have trumped up against 
Burns. Nor is there, when we look at his literary work, 
any falling off in his powers as a poet. He sang as 
sweetly, as purely, as magically as ever he did ; and this 
man, who has been branded as a blasphemer and a 
libertine, had nobly set himself to purify the polluted 
stream of Scottish Song. He was still continuing his 
contributions to Johnson's Museum, and now he had 
also begun to write for Thomson's more ambitious 
work. 

Some of the first of his Dumfriesshire songs owe 
their inspiration to a hurried visit he paid to Mrs. 
Maclehose in Edinburgh before she sailed to join her 
husband in the West Indies. The best of these 
are, perhaps. My Nannies Awa' and Ae Fond Kiss. The 
fourth verse of the latter was a favourite of Byron's, 
while Scott claims for it that it is worth a thousand 
romances — 



134 FAMOUS SCOTS 

'Had we never loved so kindly, 
Had we never loved so blindly ! 
Never met — or never parted, 
We had ne'er been broken-hearted.' 

Another song of a different kind, The DeiPs awa wP the 
Exciseman, had its origin in a raid upon a smuggling 
brig that had got into shallow water in the Solway. The 
ship was armed and well manned ; and while Lewars, a 
brother-excisemen, posted to Dumfries for a guard of 
dragoons, Burns, with a few men under him, watched to 
prevent landing or escape. It was while impatiently 
waiting Lewars's return that he composed this song. 
When the dragoons arrived Burns put himself at their 
head, and wading, sword in hand, was the first to board 
the smuggler. The affair might ultimately have led to 
his promotion had he not, next day at the sale of the 
vessel's arms and stores in Dumfries, purchased four 
carronades, which he sent, with a letter testifying his ad- 
miration and respect, to the French Legislative Assembly. 
The carronades never reached their destination, having 
been intercepted at Dover by the Custom House 
authorities. It is a pity perhaps that Burns should have 
testified his political leanings in so characteristic a way. 
It was the impetuous act of a poet roused to enthusiasm, 
as were thousands of his fellow-countrymen at the time, 
by what was thought to be the beginning of universal 
brotherhood in France. But whatever may be said as 
to the impulsive imprudence of the step, it is not to be 
condemned as a most absurd and presumptuous breach 
of decorum. We were not at war with France at this 
time ; had not even begun to await developments with 
critical suspicion. Talleyrand had not yet been slighted 



ROBERT BURNS 135 

by our Queen, and protestations of peace and friendship 
were passing between the two Governments. Any subject 
of the king might at this time have written a friendly 
letter or forwarded a token of goodwill to the French 
Government, without being suspected of disloyalty. 
But by the time the carronades had reached Dover the 
complexion of things had changed ; and yet even in those 
critical times Burns's action, though it may have hindered 
promotion, does not appear to have been interpreted as 
'a most absurd and presumptuous breach of decorum.' 
That interpretation was left for biographers made wise 
with the passions of war ; and yet they have not said in 
so many words, what they darkly insinuate, that the poet 
was not a loyal British subject. His love of country is too 
surely established. That, later, he thought the Ministry 
engaging in an unjust and unrighteous war, may be 
frankly admitted. He was not alone in his opinion ; nor 
was he the only poet carried away with a wild enthusiasm 
of Liberty, Equality, and Fraternity. Societies were then 
springing up all over the country calling for redress of 
grievances and for greater political freedom. Such 
societies were regarded by the Government of the day 
as seditious, and their agitations as dangerous to the 
peace of the country ; and Burns, though he did not 
become a member of the Society of the Friends of the 
People, was at one with them in their desire for reform. 
It was known also that he 'gat the Gazefeer,' and that 
was enough to mark him out as a disaffected person. 
No doubt he also talked imprudently ; for it was not the 
nature of this man to keep his sentiments hidden in his 
heart, and to talk the language of expediency. What he 
thought in private he advocated publicly in season and 



136 FAMOUS SCOTS 

out of season ; and it was quite in the natural course of 
things that information regarding his pohtical opinions 
should be lodged against him with the Board of Excise. 
His political conduct was made the subject of official 
inquiry, and it would appear that for a time he was in 
danger of dismissal from the service. This is a some- 
what painful episode in his life ; and we find him in a 
letter to Mr. Graham of Fintry repudiating the slander- 
ous charges, yet confessing that the tender ties of wife 
and children 'unnerve courage and wither resolution.' 
Mr. Findlater, his superior, was of opinion that only a very 
mild reprimand was administered, and the poet warned 
to be more prudent in his speech. But what appeared 
mild to Mr. Findlater was galling to Burns. In his letter 
to Erskine of Mar he says : ' One of our supervisors- 
general, a Mr. Corbet, was instructed to inquire on the 
spot and to document me — that my business was to act, 
not to think \ and that whatever might be men or meas- 
ures it was for me to be silent and obedient.^ 

We can hardly conceive a harsher sentence on one of 
Burns's temperament, and we doubt not that the de- 
gradation of being thus gagged, and the blasting of his 
hopes of promotion, were the cause of much of the 
bitterness that we find bursting from him now more 
frequently than ever, both in speech and writing. That 
remorse for misconduct irritated him against himself and 
against the world, is true ; but it is none the less true 
that he must have chafed against the servility of an 
office that forbade him the freedom of personal opinion. 
In the same letter he unburdens his heart in a burst of 
eloquent and noble indignation. 

* Burns was a poor man from birth, and an exciseman 



ROBERT BURNS 137 

by necessity ; but — I will say it — the sterling of his 
honest worth no poverty could debase ; his independent 
British mind oppression might bend, but could not 
subdue. ... I have three sons who, I see already, 
have brought into the world souls ill-qualified to inhabit 
the bodies of slaves. . . . Does any man tell me that 
my full efforts can be of no service, and that it does not 
belong to my humble station to meddle with the concerns 
of a nation ? I can tell him that it is on such indi- 
viduals as I that a nation has to rest, both for the hand 
of support and the eye of intelligence.' 

What the precise charges against him were, we are not 
informed. It is alleged that he once, when the health 
of Pitt was being drunk, interposed with the toast of 
' A greater than Pitt — George Washington.' There can 
be little fault found with the sentiment. It is given to 
poets to project themselves into futurity, and declare the 
verdict of posterity. But the occasion was ill-chosen, 
and he spoke with all a poet's imprudence. In another 
company he aroused the martial fury of an unreasoning 
captain by proposing the toast, ' May our success in the 
present war be equal to the justice of our cause.' A 
very humanitarian toast, one would think, but regarded 
as seditious by the fire-eating captain, who had not the 
sense to see that there was more of sedition in his 
resentment than in Burns's proposal. Yet the affair 
looked black enough for a time, and the poet was 
afraid that even this story would be carried to the ears 
of the commissioners, and his political opinions be again 
misrepresented. 

Another thing that came to disturb his peace of mind 
was his quarrel with Mrs. Riddell of Woodley Park, 



138 FAMOUS SCOTS 

where he had been made a welcome guest ever since 
his advent to this district. That Burns, in the heat of a 
fever of intoxication, had been guilty of a glaring act of 
impropriety in the presence of the ladies seated in the 
drawing-room, we may gather from the internal evidence 
of his letter written the following morning 'from the 
regions of hell, amid the horrors of the damned.' It 
would appear that the gentlemen left in the dining-room 
had got ingloriously drunk, and there and then proposed 
an indecorous raid on the drawing-room. Whatever it 
might be they did, it was Burns who was made to suffer 
the shame of the drunken plot. His letter of abject 
apology remained unanswered, and the estrangement 
was only embittered by some lampoons which he wrote 
afterwards on this accomplished lady. The affair was 
bruited abroad, and the heinousness of the poet's offence 
vastly exaggerated. Certain it is that he became deeply 
incensed against not only the lady, but her husband as 
well, to whom he considered he owed no apology what- 
ever. Matters were only made worse by his unworthy 
verses, and it was not till he was almost on the brink 
of the grave that he and Mrs. Riddell met again, and 
the old friendship was re-established. The lady not 
only forgot and forgave, but she was one of the first 
after the poet's death to write generously and apprecia- 
tively of his character and abilities. 

That the quarrel with Mrs. Riddell was prattled about 
in Dumfries, and led other families to drop the acquaint- 
ance of the poet, we are made painfully aware ; and in 
his correspondence now there is rancour, bitterness, and 
remorse more pronounced and more settled than at any 
other period of his life. He could not go abroad with- 



ROBERT BURNS 139 

out being reminded of the changed attitude of the world; 
he could not stay at home without seeing his noble wife 
uncomplainingly nursing a child that was not hers. He 
cursed himself for his sins and follies ; he cursed the 
world for its fickleness and want of sympathy. * His 
wit,' says Heron, ' became more gloomy and sarcastic, 
and his conversation and writings began to assume a 
misanthropical tone, by which they had not been before 
in any eminent degree distinguished. But with all his 
failings his was still that exalted mind which had raised 
itself above the depression of its original condition, with 
all the energy of the lion pawing to free his hinder limbs 
from the yet encumbering earth.' 

His health now began to give his friends serious 
concern. To Cunningham he wrote, February 24, 1794 : 
• For these two months I have not been able to lift 
a pen. My constitution and my frame were ab origine 
blasted with a deep, incurable taint of hypochondria, 
which poisons my existence.' A little later he confesses : 
' I have been in poor health. I am afraid that I am 
about to suffer for the follies of my youth. My medical 
friends threaten me with a flying gout, but I trust they 
are mistaken.' His only comfort in those days was his 
correspondence with Thomson and with Johnson. He 
kept pouring out song after song, criticising, rewriting, 
changing what was foul and impure into songs of the 
tenderest delicacy. He showed love in every mood, 
from the rapture of pure passion in the Lea Rig, the 
maidenly abandon of Whistle and I'll come to you, 7ny 
Lad, to the humour of Last May a Braw Wooer and 
Duncan Gray, and the guileless devotion of O wert 
thou in the Caiild Blast. But he sang of more than 



I40 FAMOUS SCOTS 

love. Turning from the coldness of the high and 
mighty, who had once been his friends, he found 
consolation in the naked dignity of manhood, and 
penned the hymn of humanity, A Man's a Man for a' 
that. Perhaps he found his text in Tristram Shandy : 
' Honours, like impressions upon coin, may give an 
ideal and local value to a bit of base metal, but gold 
and silver pass all the world over with no other re- 
commendation than their own weight.' Something like 
this occurs in Massinger's Duke of F/orence^ where it 
is said of princes that 

' They can give wealth and titles, but no virtues ; 
This is without their power.' 

Gower also had written — 

' A king can kill, a king can save ; 
A king can make a lord a knave, 
And of a knave a lord also.' 

But the poem is undoubtedly Burns's, and it is one he 
must have written ere he passed away. Scots wha hae 
is another of his Dumfries poems. Mr. Syme gives a 
highly-coloured and one-sided view of the poet riding in 
a storm between Gatehouse and Kenmure, where we are 
assured he composed this ode. Carlyle accepts Syme's 
authority, and adds : ' Doubtless this stern hymn was 
singing itself, as he formed it, through the soul of Burns ; 
but to the external ear it should be sung with the throat 
of the whirlwind.' Burns gives an account of the writ- 
ing of the poem, which it is difficult to reconcile with 
Mr. Syme's sensational details. It matters not, however, 
when or how it was written ; we have it now, one of the 
most martial and rousing odes ever penned. Not only 



ROBERT BURNS 141 

has it gripped the heart of Scotsmen, but it has taken 
the ear of the world ; its fire and vigour have inspired 
soldiers in the day of battle, and consoled them in the 
hour of death. We are not forgetful of the fact that 
Mrs. Hemans, who wrote some creditable verse, and 
the placid Wordsworth, discussed this ode, and agreed 
that it was little else than the rhodomontade of a school- 
boy. It is a pity that such authorities should have 
missed the charm of Scots wha hae. More than likely 
they made up for the loss in a solitary appreciation of 
Betty Foy or The Pilgrim Fathers. 

Another martial ode, composed in 1795, was called 
forth by the immediate dangers of the time. The 
country was roused by the fear of foreign invasion, and 
Burns, who had enrolled himself in the ranks of the 
Dumfriesshire Volunteers, penned the patriotic song. 
Does Haughty Gaul Invasion threat f This song itself 
might have reinstalled him in public favour, and dis- 
pelled all doubt as to his loyalty, had he cared again to 
court the society of those who had dropped him from 
the list of their acquaintance. But Burns had grown 
indifferent to any favour save the favour of his Muse ; 
besides, he was now shattered in health, and assailed 
with gloomy forebodings of an early death. For him- 
self he would have faced death manfully, but again 
it was the thought of wife and bairns that unmanned 
him. 

Not content with supplying Thomson with songs, he 
wrote letters full of hints and suggestions anent songs 
and song-making, and now and then he gave a glimpse 
of himself at work. We see him sitting under the shade 
of an old thorn crooning to himself until he gets a verse 



142 FAMOUS SCOT? 

to suit the measure he has in his mind ; looking round 
for objects in nature that are in unison and harmony 
with the cogitations of his fancy ; humming every now 
and then the air with the verses ; retiring to his study to 
commit his effusions to paper, and while he swings at 
intervals on the hind legs of his elbow-chair, criticising 
what he has written. A common walk of his when he 
was in the poetical vein was to the ruins of Lincluden 
Abbey, whither he was often accompanied by his eldest 
boy ; sometimes towards Martingdon ford, on the north 
side of the Nith. When he returned home with a set of 
verses, he listened attentively to his wife singing them, 
and if she happened to find a word that was harsh in 
sound, a smoother one was immediately substituted ; 
but he would on no account ever sacrifice sense to 
sound. 

During the earlier part of this year Burns had taken 
his full share in the political contest that was going on, 
and fought for Heron of Heron, the Whig candidate, 
with electioneering ballads, not to be claimed as great 
poems nor meant to be so ranked, but marked with 
all his incisiveness of wit and satire, and with his 
extraordinary deftness of portraiture. Heron was the 
successful candidate, and his poetical supporter again 
began to indulge in dreams of promotion : ' a life 
of literary leisure with a decent competency was the 
summit of his wishes.' But his dreams were not to 
be realised. 

In September his favourite child and only daughter, 
Elizabeth, died at Mauchline, and he was prostrated 
with grief. He had also taken very much to heart the 
inexplicable silence of his old friend, and for many years 



ROBERT BURNS 143 

constant correspondent, Mrs. Dunlop. To both these 
griefs he alludes in a letter to her, dated January 31, 
1796 : ' These many months you have been two packets 
in my debt. What sin of ignorance I have committed 
against so highly valued a friend I am utterly at a loss to 
guess. Alas ! madam, I can ill afford at this time to be 
deprived of any of the small remnant of my pleasures. 
I have lately drunk deep of the cup of affliction. The 
autumn robbed me of my only daughter and darling 
child, and that at a distance, too, and so rapidly as 
to put it out of my power to pay my last duties to 
her. I had scarcely begun to recover from that 
shock when I became myself the victim of a severe 
rheumatic fever, and long the die spun doubtful, until, 
after many weeks of a sickbed, it seems to have turned 
up life.' 

There was an evident decline in the poet's appear- 
ance. Dr. Currie tells us, for upwards of a year before 
his death, and he himself was sensible that his consti- 
tution was sinking. During almost the whole of the 
winter of 1795-96 he had been confined to the house. 
Then follows the unsubstantiated story which has done 
duty for Shakspeare and many other poets. ' He dined 
at a tavern, returned home about three o'clock in a very 
cold morning, benumbed and intoxicated. This was 
followed by an attack of rheumatism.' It is difficult to 
kill a charitable myth, especially one that is so agree- 
able to the levelling instincts of ordinary humanity, and 
of such sweet consolation to the weaker brethren. Of 
course there are variants of the story, with a stair and 
sleep and snow brought in as sensational, if improbable, 
accessories; but such stories as these all good men 



144 FAMOUS SCOTS 

refuse to believe, unless they are compelled to do so by 
the conclusive evidence of direct authority; and that, in 
this case, is altogether awanting. All evidence that has 
been forthcoming has gone directly against it, and the 
story may be accepted as a myth. The fact is that brains 
have been ransacked to find reason for the poet's early 
death, — as if the goings and comings of death could be 
scientifically calculated in biography, — and the last years 
of his ' irregular life ' are blamed : Dumfries is set apart 
as the chief sinner. No doubt his life was irregular 
there ; his duties were irregular ; his hours were irregular. 
But Burns in his thirty-six years had lived a full life, 
putting as much into one year as the ordinary sons of 
men put into two. He had had threatenings of rheu- 
matism and heart disease when he was an overworked 
lad at Lochlea ; and now his constitution was breaking 
up from the rate at which he had lived. Excess of work 
more than excess of drink brought him to an early 
grave. During his few years' stay at Dumfries he had 
written over two hundred poems, songs, etc., many of 
them of the highest excellence, and most of them now 
household possessions. Besides his official duties, we 
know also that he took a great interest in his home and 
in the education of his children. Mr. Gray, master of 
the High School of Dumfries, who knew the poet inti- 
mately, wrote a long and interesting letter to Gilbert 
Burns, in which he mentions particularly the attention 
he paid to his children's education. ' He was a kind 
and attentive father, and took great delight in spending 
his evenings in the cultivation of the minds of his chil- 
dren. Their education was the grand object of his life; 
and he did not, like most parents, think it sufficient to 



ROBERT BURNS 145 

send them to public schools; he was their private 
instructor ; and even at that early age bestowed great 
pains in training their minds to habits of thought and 
reflection, and in keeping them pure from every form of 
vice. This he considered a sacred duty, and never to 
his last illness relaxed in his diUgence.' 

Throughout the winter of 1795 ^^d spring of 1796, 
he could only keep up an irregular correspondence with 
Thomson. ' Alas 1' he wrote in April, ' I fear it will be 
long ere I tune my lyre again. I have only known 
existence by the pressure of the heavy hand of sickness, 
and counted time by the repercussion of pain. I close my 
eyes in misery and open them without hope.' Yet it was 
literally on his deathbed that he composed the exquisite 
song, wert thoti in the Cauld Blasts in honour of 
Jessie Lewars, who waited on him so faithfully. In June 
he wrote : ' I begin to fear the worst. As to my indi- 
vidual self I am tranquil, and would despise myself if I 
were not ; but Burns's poor widow and half a dozen of 
his dear little ones — helpless orphans ! — there, I am 
weaker than a woman's tear.' 

From Brow, whither he had gone to try the effect of 
sea-bathing, he wrote several letters all in the same 
strain, one to Cunningham; a pathetic one to Mrs. 
Dunlop, regretting her continued silence; and letters 
begging a temporary loan to James Burness, Montrose, 
and to George Thomson, whom he had been supplying 
with songs without fee or reward. Thomson at once 
forwarded the amount asked — five pounds ! To his wife, 
who had not been able to accompany him, he wrote : 
' My dearest love, I delayed writing until I could tell you 
what effect sea-bathing was likely to produce. It would 
10 



146 FAMOUS SCOTS 

be injustice to deny it has eased my pain. ... I will 
see you on Sunday.' 

During his stay at Brow he met again Mrs. Riddell, 
and she has left in a letter her impression of his 
appearance at that time. 'The stamp of death was 
imprinted on his features. He seemed already touching 
the brink of eternity. ... He spoke of his death with 
firmness as well as feeling as an event likely to happen 
very soon. ... He said he was well aware that his 
death would occasion some noise, and that every scrap 
of his writing would be revived against him, to the 
injury of his future reputation. . . . The conversa- 
tion was kept up with great evenness and animation on 
his side. I had seldom seen his mind greater or more 
collected.' 

When he returned from Brow he was worse than when 
he went away, and those who saw him tottering to his 
door knew that they had looked their last on the poet. 
The question in Dumfries for a day or two was, ' How 
is Burns now?' And the question was not long in 
being answered. He knew he was dying, but neither 
his humour nor his wit left him. 'John,' he said to 
one of his brother volunteers, 'don't let the awkward 
squad fire over me.' 

He lingered on for a day or two, his wife hourly 
expecting to be confined and unable to attend to 
him, and Jessie Lewars taking her place, a constant 
and devoted nurse. On the fourth day after his 
return, July 21, he sank into delirium, and his chil- 
dren were summoned to the bedside of their dying 
father, who quietly and gradually sank to rest. His 
last words showed that his mind was still disturbed 



ROBERT BURNS 147 

by the thought of the small debt that had caused him 
so much annoyance. 'And thus he passed/ says 
Carlyle, ' not softly, yet speedily, into that still country 
where the hailstorms and fire-showers do not reach, and 
the heaviest laden wayfarer at length lays down his 
load.' 



CHAPTER IX 

SUMMARY AND ESTIMATE 

In Mrs. Riddell's sketch of Burns, which appeared 
shortly after his death, she starts with the somewhat 
starthng statement that poetry was not actually \i\s forte. 
She did not question the excellence of his songs, or 
seek to depreciate his powers as a poet, but she spoke 
of the man as she had known him, and was one of the 
first to assert that Burns was very much more than an 
uneducated peasant with a happy knack of versification. 
Even in the present day we hear too much of the in- 
spired ploughman bursting into song as one that could 
not help himself, and warbling of life and love in a 
kind of lyrical frenzy. The fact is that Burns was a 
great intellectual power, and would have been a force 
in any sphere of life or letters. All who met him and 
heard him talk have insisted on the greatness of the 
man, apart from his achievements in poetry. It was not 
his fame as a poet that made him the lion of a season 
in Edinburgh, but the force and brilliancy of his con- 
versation ; and it needs more than the reputation of a 
minstrel to explain the hold he has on the affection and 
intelligence of the world to-day. 

On the other hand, it would be a mistake to accept 

his intellectual greatness as a mere tradition of those 

148 



ROBERT BURNS 149 

who knew him, and to regret that he has not left us 
some long and ponderous work worthy of the power he 
possessed. It is an absurd idea to imagine that every 
great poet ought to write an epic or a play. Burns's 
powers were concentrative, and he could put into a 
song what a dramatist might elaborate into a five-act 
tragedy; but that is not to say that the dramatist is 
the greater poet. After all, the song is the more likely 
to hve, and the more likely, therefore, to keep the 
mission of the poet an enduring and living influence in 
the lives of men. 

Still Burns might have been a great song -writer 
without becoming the name and power he is in the 
world to-day. The lyrical gift implies a quick emotional 
sense, which in some cases may be little more than 
a beautiful defect in a weak nature. But Burns was 
essentially a strong man. His very vices are the vices 
of a robust and healthy humanity. Besides being 
possessed of all the qualities of a great singer, he was 
at the same time vigorously human and throbbing with 
the love and joy of life. It is this sterling quality of 
manhood that has made Burns the poet and the power 
he is. He looked out on the world with the eyes of a 
man, and saw things in their true colours and in their 
natural relations. He regarded the world into which 
he had been born, and saw it not as some other poet 
or an artist or a painter might have beheld it,— for the 
purposes of art,— but in all its uncompromising realism^— 
and what his eye saw clearly, his lips as clearly uttered. 
His first and greatest gift, therefore, as a poet was his 
manifest sincerity. His men and women are living 
human beings ; his flowers are real flowers ; his dogs, 



I50 FAMOUS SCOTS' 

real dogs, and nothing more. All his pictures are 
presented in the simplest and fewest possible words. 
There is no suspicion of trickery ; no attempt to force 
words to carry a weight of meaning they are incapable 
of expressing. He knew nothing of the deification of 
style, and on absolute truthfulness and unidealised 
reality rested his poetical structure. Wordsworth 
speaks of him — 

'Whose light I hailed when first it shone, 
And showed my youth 
Ho'.v verse may build a princely throne 
On humble truth.' 

It is this quality that made Burns the interpreter of 
the lives of his fellow-men, not only to an outside world 
that knew them not, but to themselves. And he has 
glorified those lives in the interpretation, not by the 
introduction of false elements or the elimination of 
unlovely features, but simply by his insistence, in spite 
of the sordidness of poverty, on the naked dignity of 
man. 

Everything he touched became interesting because 
it was interesting to him, and he spoke forth what he 
felt. For Burns did not go outside of his own life, 
either in time or place, for subject. There are poetry 
and romance, tragedy and comedy ever waiting for the 
man who has eyes to see them ; and Burns's stage 
was the parish of Tarbolton, and he found his poetry 
in (or rendered poetical) the ordinary humdrum life 
round about him. For that reason it is, perhaps, that 
he has been called the satirist and singer of a parish. 
Had he lived nowadays, he would have been relegated 
to the kailyard, there to cultivate his hardy annuals and 



ROBERT BURNS 151 

indigenous daisies. For Burns did not affect exotics, 
and it requires a specialist in manure to produce blue 
dandelions or sexless ferns. In the narrow sense of the 
word he was not parochial. Whilst true to class and 
country, he reached out a hand to universal man. A 
Scotsman of Scotsmen, he endeared himself to the 
hearts of a people ; but he was from first to last a man, 
and so has found entrance to the hearts of all men. 
Although local in subject, he was artistic in treatment ; 
he might address the men and women of Mauchline, 
but he spoke with the voice of humanity, and his message 
was for mankind. 

Besides interpreting the lives of the Scottish peasantry, 
he revived for them their nationality. For he was but 
the last of the great bards that sang the Iliad of Scot- 
land ; and in him, when patriotism was all but dead, and 
a hybrid culture was making men ashamed of their land 
and their language, the voices of nameless ballad- 
makers and forgotten singers blended again into one 
great voice that sang of the love of country, till men 
remembered their fathers, and gloried in the name 
of Scotsmen. His patriotism, however, was not 
parochial. It was no mere prejudice which bound him 
hand and foot to Scottish theme and Scottish song. 
He knew that there were lands beyond the Cheviots, 
and that men of other countries and other tongues joyed 
and sorrowed, toiled and sweated and struggled and hoped 
even as he did. He was attached to the people of his 
own rank in life, the farmers and ploughmen amongst 
whom he had been born and bred ; but his sympathies 
went out to all men, prince or peasant, beggar or king, 
if they were worthy of the name of men he recognised 



152 FAMOUS SCOTS 

them as brothers. It is this sympathy which gives him 
his intimate knowledge of mankind. He sees into the 
souls of his fellows ; the thoughts of their hearts are 
visible to his piercing eye. He who had mixed only 
with hard-working men, and scarcely ever been beyond 
the boundary of his parish, wrote of court and parliament 
as if he had known princes and politicians from his boy- 
hood. The goodwife of Wauchope House would hardly 
credit that he had come straight from the plough-stilts — 

' And then sae slee ye crack your jokes 
O' Willie Pitt and Charlie Fox ; 
Our great men a' sae weel descrive, 
And how to gar the nation thrive, 
Ane maist would swear ye dwalt amang them, 
And as ye saw them sae ye sang them.' 

But his intuitive knowledge of men is apparent in 
almost all he wrote. Every character he has drawn 
stands out a living and breathing personality. This is 
greatly due to the fact that he studied those he met, 
as men, dismissing the circumstance of birth and rank, 
of costly apparel, or beggarly rags. For rank and 
station after all are mere accidents, and count for 
nothing in an estimate of character. Indeed, Burns 
was too often inclined from his hard experience of life 
to go further than this, and to count them disqualifying 
circumstances. This aggressive independence was, how- 
ever, always as far removed from insolence as it was 
from servility. He saw clearly that the ' pith o' sense 
and pride o' worth ' are beyond all the dignities a king 
can bestow ; and he looked to the time when class dis- 
tinctions would cease, and the glory of manhood be the 
highest earthly dignity. 



ROBERT BURNS 153 

•Then let us pray that come it may— 
As come it will for a' that — 
That sense and worth, o'er a' the earth, 
May bear the gree and a' that ! 
For a' that, and a' that, 

It's comin' yet, for a' that, 
That man to man, the warld o'er, 
Shall brothers be for a' that ! ' 

Besides this abiding love of his fellow-man, or because 
of it, Burns had also a childlike love of nature and all 
created things. He sings of the mountain daisy turned 
up by his plough; his heart goes out to the mouse 
rendered homeless after all its provident care. Listening 
at home while the storm made the doors and windows 
rattle, he bethought him on the cattle and sheep and 
birds outside — 

' I thought me on the ourie cattle 
Or silly sheep, wha bide this brattle 

O' wintry war. 
And thro' the drift, deep-lairing, sprattle 

Beneath a scaur.' 

Nor is there in his love of nature any transcendental 
strain ; no mawkish sentimentality, and consequently in 
its expression no bathos. Everywhere in his poetry 
nature comes in, at times in artistically selected detail, 
at times again with a deft suggestive touch that is 
telling and effective, yet always in harmony with the 
feeling of the poem, and always subordinate to it. His 
descriptions of scenery are never dragged in. They are 
incidental and complementary; human life and human 
feeling are the first consideration ; to this his scenery is 
but the setting and background. He is never carried 



154 FAMOUS SCOTS 

away by the force or beauty of his drawing as a smaller 
artist might have been. The picture is given with 
simple conciseness, and he leaves it; nor does he ever 
attempt to elaborate a detail into a separate poem. The 
description of the burn in Hallowe^en is most beautiful 
in itself, yet it is but a detail in a great picture — 

' Whyles owre a linn the burnie plays, 
As thro' the glen it wimpl't ; 
Whyles round a rocky scaur it strays ; 

Whyles in a wiel it dimpl't ; 
Whyles glitter'd to the nightly rays, 

Wi' bickerin', dancin' dazzle ; 
Whyles cookit underneath the braes, 
Below the spreading hazel, 

Unseen that night.' 

That surely is the perfection of description ; whilst the 
wimple of the burn is echoed in the music of the 
verse ! 

Allied to the clearness of vision and truthfulness of 
presentment of Burns, growing out of them it may be, 
is that graphic power in which he stands unexcelled. 
He is a great artist, and word-painting is not the least 
of his many gifts. He combines terseness and lucidity, 
which is a rare combination in letters ; his phrasing is 
as beautiful and fine as it is forcible, which is a dis- 
tinction rarer still. Hundreds of examples of his 
pregnant phrasing might be cited, but it is best to see 
them in the poems. Many have become everyday ex- 
pressions, and have passed into the proverbs of the 
country. 

Another of Burns's gifts was the saving grace of humour. 
This, of course, is not altogether a quality distinct in 
itself, but rather a particular mode in which love or 



ROBERT BURNS 155 

tenderness or pity may manifest itself. This humour is 
ever glinting forth from his writings. Some of his poems 
— The Farmer's Address to his Auld Mare, for example 
— are simply bathed in it, and we see the subject glowing 
in its light, soft and tremulous, as of an autumn sunset. 
In others, again, it flashes and sparkles, more sportive 
than tender. But, however it manifest itself, we recognise 
at once that it has a character of its own, which marks 
it off from the humour of any other writer ; it is a peculiar 
possession of Burns. 

Perhaps the poem in which all Burns's poetic qualities 
are seen at their best is The /oily Beggars. The subject 
may be low and the materials coarse, but that only makes 
the finished poem a more glorious achievement. For the 
poem is a unity. We see those vagabonds for a moment's 
space holding high revel in Poosie Nansie's ; but in that 
brief glance we see them from their birth to their death. 
They are flung into the world, and go zigzagging through 
it, chaff'ering and cheating, swaggering and swearing ; 
kicked and cuffed from parish to parish ; their only joy 
of existence an occasional night like this, a carnival of 
drink and all sensuality ; snapping their fingers in the 
face of the world, and as they have lived so going down 
defiantly to death, a laugh on their lips and a curse in 
their heart. Every character in it is individual and 
distinct from his neighbour ; the language from first to 
last simple, sensuous, musical. Of this poem Matthew 
Arnold says : * It has a breadth, truth, and power which 
make the famous scene in Auerbach's cellar of Goethe's 
Faust seem artificial and tame beside it, and which are 
only matched by Shakspeare and Aristophanes.' 

The Cotter's Saturday Night has usually, in Scotland, 



156 FAMOUS SCOTS 

been the most lauded of his poems. Many writers give 
it as his best. It is a pious opinion, but is not sound 
criticism. Burns handicapped himself, not only by the 
stanza he selected for this poem, but also by the attitude 
he took towards his subject. He is never quite himself 
in it. We admire its many beauties ; we see the life of 
the poor made noble and dignified ; we see, in the end, 
the soul emerging from the tyranny of time and circum- 
stance ; but with all that we feel that there is something 
awanting. The priest-like father is drawn from life, and 
the picture is beautiful ; not less deftly drawn is the 
mother's portrait, though it be not so frequently quoted : 

' The mother, wi' a woman's wiles, can spy 
What makes the youth so bashfu' and so grave ; 
Weel pleased to think her bairn's respected like the lave.' 

The last line gives one of the most natural and most 
subtle touches in the whole poem. The closing verses 
are, I think, unhappy. The poet has not known when 
to stop, keeps writing after he has finished, and so becomes 
stilted and artificial. 

It is in his songs, however, more than in his poems, 
that we find Burns most regularly at his best. And 
excellence in song-writing is a rare gift. The snatches 
scattered here and there throughout the plays of Shak- 
speare are perhaps the only collection of lyrics that can 
at all stand comparison with the wealth of minstrelsy 
Burns has left behind him. This was his undying legacy 
to the world. Song-writing was a labour of love, almost 
his only comfort and consolation in the dark days of his 
later years. He set himself to this as to a congenial task, 
and he knew that he was writing himself into the hearts 



ROBERT BURNS 157 

of unborn generations. His songs live ; they are im- 
mortal, because every one is a bit of his soul. These 
are no feverish, hysterical jingles of clinking verse, dead 
save for the animating breath of music. They sing 
themselves, because the spirit of song is in them. Quite 
as marvellous as his excellence in this department of 
poetry is his variety of subject. He has a song for every 
age ; a musical interpretation of every mood. But this is 
a subject for a book to itself. His songs are sung all 
over the world. The love he sings appeals to all, for it 
is elemental, and is the love of all. Heart speaks to 
heart in the songs of Robert Burns ; there is a free- 
masonry in them that binds Scotsmen to Scotsmen across 
the seas in the firmest bonds of brotherhood. 

What place Burns occupies as a poet has been deter- 
mined not so much by the voice of criticism, as by the 
enthusiastic vfa.y in which his fellow-mortals have taken 
him to their heart. The summing-up of a judge counts for 
little when the jury has already made up its mind. What 
matters it whether a critic argues Burns into a first 
or second or third rate poet ? His countrymen, and 
more than his countrymen, his brothers all the world 
over, who read in his writings the joys and sorrows, the 
temptations and trials, the sins and shortcomings of a 
great-hearted man, have accepted him as a prophet, and 
set him in the front rank of immortals. They admire 
many poets ; they love Robert Burns. They have been 
told their love is unreasoning and unreasonable. It may 
be so. Love goes by instinct more than by reason ; and 
who shall say it is wrong? Yet Burns is not loved 
because of his faults and failings, but in spite of them. 
His sins are not hidden. He himself confessed them 



158 FAMOUS SCOTS 

again and again, and repented in sackcloth and ashes. 
If he did not always abjure his weaknesses, he denounced 
them, and with no uncertain voice ; nor do we know how 
hardly he strove to do more. 

What estimate is to be taken of Burns as a man 
will have many and various answers. Those who still 
denounce him as the chief of sinners, and without 
mercy condemn him out of his own mouth, are those 
whom Burns has pilloried to all posterity. There are 
dull, phlegmatic beings with blood no warmer than 
ditch-water, who are virtuous and sober citizens because 
they have never felt the force of temptation. What 
power could tempt them? The tree may be parched 
and blistered in the heat of noonday, but the parasitical 
fungus draining its sap remains cool — and poisonous. 
So in the glow of sociability the Pharisee remains cold 
and clammy ; the fever of love leaves his blood at zero. 
How can such anomahes understand a man of Burns's 
wild and passionate nature, or, indeed, human nature 
at all? The broad fact remains, however much we may 
deplore his sins and shortcomings, they are the sins 
and shortcomings of a large-hearted, healthy, human 
being. Had he loved less his fellow men and women, 
he might have been accounted a better man. After all, 
too, it must be remembered that his failings have been 
consistently exaggerated. Coleridge, in his habit of 
drawing nice distinctions, admits that Burns was not a 
man of degraded genius, but a degraded man of genius. 
Burns was neither the one nor the other. In spite of 
the occasional excesses of his later years, he did not 
degenerate into drunkenness, nor was the sense of his 
responsibilities as a husband, a father, and a man less 



ROBERT BURNS 159 

clear and acute in the last months of his life than it had 
ever been. Had he lived a few years longer, we should 
have seen the man mellowed by sorrow and suffering, 
braving life, not as he had done all along with the 
passionate vehemence of undisciplined youth, but with 
the fortitude and dignity of one who had learned that 
contentment and peace are gifts the world cannot give, 
and, if he haply find them in his own heart, which it 
cannot take away. That is the lesson we read in the 
closing months of Burns's chequered career. 

But it was not to be. His work was done. The 
message God had sent him into the world to deliver he 
had delivered, imperfectly and with faltering lips it may 
be, but a divine message all the same. And because it 
is divine men still hear it gladly and believe. 

Let all his failings and defects be acknowledged, his 
sins as a man and his limitations as a poet, the want of 
continuity and purpose in his work and life ; but at the 
same time let his nobler qualities be weighed against 
these, and the scale ' where the pure gold is, easily turns 
the balance.' In the words of Angellier : 'Admiration 
grows in proportion as we examine his qualities. When 
we think of his sincerity, of his rectitude, of his kind- 
ness towards man and beast ; of his scorn of all that is 
base, his hatred of all knavery which in itself would be 
an honour ; of his disinterestedness, of the fine impulses 
of his heart, and the high aspirations of his spirit ; of 
the intensity and idealism necessary to maintain his soul 
above its circumstances; when we reflect that he has 
expressed all these generous sentiments to the extent 
of their constituting his intellectual life ; that they have 
fallen from him as jewels ... as if his soul had been 



i6o FAMOUS SCOTS 

a furnace for the purification of precious metals, we are 
tempted to regard him as belonging to the elect spirits 
of humanity, to those gifted with exceptional goodness. 
When we recall what he suffered, what he surmounted, and 
what he has effected ; against what privations his genius 
struggled into birth and lived ; the perseverance of his 
apprenticeship; his intellectual exploits; and, after all, 
his glory, we are inclined to maintain that what he failed 
to accomplish or undertake is as nothing in comparison 
with his achievements. . . . There is nothing left but to 
confess that the clay of which he was made was thick 
with diamonds, and that his life was one of the most 
valiant and the most noble a poet ever has lived.' 

With Burns's own words we may fitly conclude. 
They are words not merely to be read and admired, 
but to be remembered in our hearts and practised in 
our lives — 

' Then gently scan your brother Man, 

Still gentler sister Woman ; 
The' they may gang a kennin wrang, 

To step aside is human : 
One point must still be greatly dark, 

The moving Why they do it ; 
And just as lamely can ye mark. 

How far perhaps they rue it. 

Who made the heart, 'tis He alone 

Decidedly can try us, 
He knows each chord — its various tone, 

Each spring — its various bias : 
Then at the balance let's be mute, 

We never can adjust it ; 
What's done we partly may compute, 

But know not what's resisted.' 



